Chiral phonons driven by chiral cavities
Abstract
Lattice vibrations carrying angular momentum give rise to fundamental phenomena such as the phonon Hall effect and the Einstein-de Haas effect, offering new opportunities for manipulating angular momentum in condensed-matter systems. Generating such circularly polarized phonons requires either the use of an external magnetic field, or of polarized light pulses. The latter approach does not require the use of any magnetic response of the material, but it has limitations, in particular regarding the duration of the pulse. Consequently, any effect stemming from phonons generated by light pulses is transient. In this paper, we propose the use of a driven electromagnetic cavity as a route to generate a steady-state population of chiral phonons. We derive a general description of cavity-chiral phonon interaction, with a particular focus on modes of chiral cavities. We show that, under optimized conditions, a significant effective phonon-induced magnetic field can be generated by means of an external drive with realistic power. Our approach is specially tailored for Gamma point phonons with THz frequencies, and opens a new route for investigating chiral phonons with electromagnetic cavities.
Related
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BibTeX
@misc{bittencourt2026chiral,
title = {{Chiral phonons driven by chiral cavities}},
author = {V. A. S. V. Bittencourt and N. Shabala and R. M. Geilhufe and A. Metelmann},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = sep,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2609.00368},
eprint = {2609.00368},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.00368},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Chiral phonons driven by chiral cavities
AU - V. A. S. V. Bittencourt
AU - N. Shabala
AU - R. M. Geilhufe
AU - A. Metelmann
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/09/01
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2609.00368
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.00368
AB - Lattice vibrations carrying angular momentum give rise to fundamental phenomena such as the phonon Hall effect and the Einstein-de Haas effect, offering new opportunities for manipulating angular momentum in condensed-matter systems. Generating such circularly polarized phonons requires either the use of an external magnetic field, or of polarized light pulses. The latter approach does not require the use of any magnetic response of the material, but it has limitations, in particular regarding the duration of the pulse. Consequently, any effect stemming from phonons generated by light pulses is transient. In this paper, we propose the use of a driven electromagnetic cavity as a route to generate a steady-state population of chiral phonons. We derive a general description of cavity-chiral phonon interaction, with a particular focus on modes of chiral cavities. We show that, under optimized conditions, a significant effective phonon-induced magnetic field can be generated by means of an external drive with realistic power. Our approach is specially tailored for Gamma point phonons with THz frequencies, and opens a new route for investigating chiral phonons with electromagnetic cavities.
ER -