Chiral Phonons in Moir\'e Superlattices

TL;DR

This paper reports the discovery of chiral phonons in moiré superlattices, which are collective excitations arising from stacking configurations that break certain symmetries, with potential applications in phononic twistronics.

Contribution

It provides a symmetry-based classification, a theoretical model, and an example calculation demonstrating the existence and properties of moiré chiral phonons.

Findings

Chiral phonons exist at the lowest-energy bands in moiré superlattices.

Stacking configurations breaking $C_{2z}$ symmetry induce these phonons.

The model captures the essential physics of moiré chiral phonons.

Abstract

We discover chiral phonons at the lowest-energy bands in moir\'e superlattices. The moir\'e chiral phonons we uncover are the collective excitations of the stacking domains. Their origin is uniquely attributed to the stacking configurations whose interlayer binding energy breaks the $C_{2z}$ symmetry on the moir\'e length scale. Within elastic theory, we use a general symmetry analysis to provide a complete classification of van der Waals heterostructures in respect to hosting moir\'e chiral phonons and show the calculation for twisted MoS$_2$ as an example. We present a low-energy effective model to qualitatively understand the moir\'e chiral phonons and show that it captures the essential physics remarkably well. Our result potentially opens up new possibilities in phononic twistronics as the moir\'e chiral phonons have high tunability, moir\'e scale wavelengths, excitation energies in only a few meV, and can possibly be mechanically excited.