Giant Thermal-Conductivity Enhancement from Chiral-Phonon Pseudo-Angular Momentum Conservation

Abstract

Pseudo-angular momentum (PAM) underlies optical selection rules for chiral phonons, but whether it also constrains thermally populated finite-wave-number phonon-phonon scattering has remained unresolved. We show that rotational or screw eigenphase conservation imposes a PAM residue rule on cubic anharmonic vertices, revealing a hidden selection rule for heat transport. In screw-symmetric helical Te, an exact platform, implementing this rule as a projector in first-principles Boltzmann transport leaves spectra and force constants unchanged but removes roughly two thirds of kinematically allowed triplets, suppresses resistive Umklapp relaxation, and enhances lattice thermal conductivity by a factor of 5.30 at 300 K, remaining above fivefold up to 400 K. A bulk chiral-crystal benchmark further shows that explicit eigenphase organization can increase the calculated lattice thermal conductivity by about 24%, comparable to the reported first-principles underestimation of experiment. These results establish PAM conservation as an anharmonic selection principle for chiral-phonon heat transport and as a fundamental principle to guide the prediction and control of thermal conductivity in chiral crystals and nanoscale phononics.

6 pages, 5 figures