2025/04/04 by Hiroki Ueda, Abhishek Nag, Ueda, Hiroki +9 · 4 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #Advanced Condensed Matter Physics #FOS: Physical sciences #Photorefractive and Nonlinear Optics #Strongly Correlated Electrons (cond-mat.str-el) #Topological Materials and Phenomena
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2504.03330
openalex publication_date 2025/04/04 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/01
Quasiparticles describe collective excitations in many-body systems, and their symmetry classification is of fundamental importance because they govern physical processes on various timescales, e.g., excited states, transport phenomena, and phase transitions. Recent studies have revealed that quasiparticles can possess chirality and that this degree of freedom leads to various important phenomena. Among them, chiral phonons have recently attracted significant interest because of their intrinsic magnetism, which non-trivially bridges the spin system and the lattice. Here, we directly prove the presence of chiral phonons in a prototypical polar crystal LiNbO3. Our demonstration adds a polar crystal in the showcase of materials hosting chiral phonons and, furthermore, creates a substantial potential in chiral phononics because of its expected in-situ switchable phonon chirality and associated control of phonon angular momentum.