Chiral Phonons in Chiral Materials

TL;DR

This paper uncovers the intrinsic link between crystal structure chirality and phonon excitations, demonstrating how phonon chirality is coupled with lattice chirality and proposing a chirality diode effect for controlling phonon transport.

Contribution

It reveals the fundamental physics of chirality coupling in crystals and predicts a chirality diode effect, supported by models and a real material, with implications for thermal and information device design.

Findings

Phonon chirality is strongly coupled with lattice chirality.

Chiral crystals support propagating chiral phonons on principal axes.

Prediction of a chirality diode effect controlling phonon transmission.

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.