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

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.