Abstract
AbstractChirality is a manifestation of the asymmetry inherent in nature. It has been defined as the symmetry breaking of the parity of static objects, and the definition was extended to dynamic motion such that true and false chiralities were distinguished. Recently, rotating, yet not propagating, atomic motions were predicted and observed in two-dimensional materials, and they were referred to as ‘chiral phonons’. A natural development would be the discovery of truly chiral phonons that propagate while rotating in three-dimensional materials. Here we used circularly polarized Raman scattering and first-principles calculations to identify truly chiral phonons in chiral bulk crystals. This approach enabled us to determine the chirality of a crystal in a non-contact and non-destructive manner. In addition, we demonstrated that the law of the conservation of pseudo-angular momentum holds between circularly polarized photons and chiral phonons. These findings are expected to help develop ways for transferring the pseudo-angular momentum from photons to electron spins via propagating chiral phonons in opto-phononic-spintronic devices.
Funder
MEXT | Japan Society for the Promotion of Science
MEXT | National Institutes of Natural Sciences
Publisher
Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Subject
General Physics and Astronomy
Reference41 articles.
1. Kelvin, W. T. B. Baltimore Lectures on Molecular Dynamics and the Wave Theory of Light (Cambridge Univ. Press, 1904).
2. Cahn, R. S., Ingold, C. & Prelog, V. Specification of molecular chirality. Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. Engl. 5, 385–415 (1966).
3. Barron, L. D. Molecular Light Scattering and Optical Activity 2nd edn (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2004).
4. Božovic, I. Possible band-structure shapes of quasi-one-dimensional solids. Phys. Rev. B 29, 6586–6599 (1984).
5. Zhang, L. & Niu, Q. Chiral phonons at high-symmetry points in monolayer hexagonal lattices. Phys. Rev. Lett. 115, 115502 (2015).
Cited by
28 articles.
订阅此论文施引文献
订阅此论文施引文献,注册后可以免费订阅5篇论文的施引文献,订阅后可以查看论文全部施引文献