Chiral Phonons in Chiral Materials

Abstract

The concept of chirality makes ubiquitous appearance in nature. Particularly, both a structure and its collective excitations may acquire well defined chiralities. In this work, we reveal an intrinsic connection between the chiralities of a crystal structure and its phonon excitations. We show that the phonon chirality and its propagation direction are strongly coupled with the lattice chirality, which will be reversed when a chiral lattice is switched to its enantiomorph. In addition, distinct from achiral lattices, propagating chiral phonons exist for chiral crystals also on the principal axis through the $\Gamma$ point, which strengthens its relevance to various physical processes. We demonstrate our theory with a 1D helix-chain model and with a concrete and important 3D material, the $\alpha$-quartz. We predict a chirality diode effect in these systems, namely, at certain frequency window, a chiral signal can only pass the system in one way but not the other, specified by the system chirality. Experimental setups to test our theory are proposed. Our work discovers fundamental physics of chirality coupling between different levels of a system, and the predicted effects will provide a new way to control thermal transport and design information devices.

arXiv comment5 pages, 5 figures

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Cited by in corpus (29)

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• Unified description of electronic orderings and cross correlations by complete multipole representation
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• Chiral phonons: circularly polarized Raman spectroscopy and $\text{ab initio}$ calculations in a chiral crystal tellurium
• Weyl phonons in chiral crystals
• Elastic Valley Spin Controlled Chiral Coupling in Topological Valley Phononic Crystals
• Frequency splitting of chiral phonons from broken time reversal symmetry in CrI${}_3$
• Quantification of chirality based on electric toroidal monopole
• Chirality-induced Phonon-Spin Conversion at an Interface
• Theory of Energy Dispersion of Chiral Phonon
• Observation of Phonon Angular Momentum
• Selective observation of enantiomeric chiral phonons in $\alpha$-quartz
• Classification of materials with phonon angular momentum and microscopic origin of angular momentum
• Transverse Peierls Transition
• Quantifying the Chirality of Vibrational Modes in Helical Molecular Chains
• Chiral Phonons in 2D Halide Perovskites
• Mind the Gap: From Resolving Theoretical Foundations of Chiral(ity)-Induced Spin Selectivity to Pioneering Implementations in Quantum Sensing
• Chiral phonons in binary compounds $A$Bi ($A$ = K, Rb, Cs) with P2${}_1$/c structure
• Theory of spin Seebeck effect activated by acoustic chiral phonons
• Electrically Controllable Chiral Phonons in Ferroelectric Materials
• Coexistent topological and chiral phonons in chiral RhGe: An ab initio study
• Physics of Phonons in Systems with Approximate Screw Symmetry
• Phonon pseudoangular momentum in $\alpha$-MoO${}_3$
• Ferroaxial phonons in chiral and polar NiCo2TeO6
• Symmetry-guided catalogue of chiral phonon materials
• Thermal Einstein-de Haas Effect Induced by Chiral Phonons in Carbon Nanotubes
• Chiral magnon in ferromagnetic chiral crystals
• Impact of Metal Cation on Chiral Properties of 2D Halide Perovskites
• Inelastic Neutron Scattering for Direct Detection of Chiral Phonons