147 years after Hall Effect discovery, scientists find it works in-plane

An atomic force microscopy scan of a nanometer-sized device developed by Carnegie Mellon scientists that demonstrates a new form of the Hall effect. For more than a century, the Hall effect has been taught with a simple picture that electricity flows through a material, a magnetic field pushes the moving charges sideways, and a voltage appears across the material. Now, scientists have found a way to make that familiar phenomenon work in a direction once thought impossible. According to a report published on Science Daily, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have demonstrated an unusual form of the Hall effect in which a magnetic field lying within the plane of a material can produce a measurable Hall response. The discovery, published in Nature Materials, challenges a long-standing assumption in condensed-matter physics and could eventually lead to simpler magnetic sensors capable of detecting fields along multiple directions. According to the online report, Edwin Hall discovered the Hall effect in 1879. In the conventional setup, a magnetic field is applied perpendicular to a material carrying an electric current. The field deflects moving charges, creating a voltage that ca...