Chirality in Condensed Matter: Symmetry, Waves, and Quasiparticles
Abstract
Chirality has become a recurring concept throughout condensed-matter physics, appearing in contexts ranging from optical activity and chiral phonons to magnetic excitations and hybrid quasiparticles. As its use has expanded, however, the concept has often become intertwined with related notions such as angular momentum, polarization, helicity, and nonreciprocity, obscuring its precise symmetry-based meaning. Although chirality is universally associated with broken spatial-inversion (π«) symmetry and preserved time-reversal (π―) symmetry, its physical manifestation and quantitative characterization strongly depend on the system and phenomenon under consideration. In this review, we examine chirality across photons, phonons, magnons, and hybrid excitations. We show that, while no universal measure of chirality exists, different physical systems admit different π«-odd and π―-even quantities that characterize specific chiral phenomena. We further argue that chirality is often best understood through chirality-selective interactions between waves, matter, and quasiparticles rather than as an intrinsic property of isolated excitations. From this perspective, hybridization provides a particularly promising setting for the emergence, transfer, and control of chirality in condensed-matter systems.
Related
- Quantum geometry phenomena in condensed matter systems
- Ideal interaction dynamics of defects and background fields in condensed matter
- Superinsulation, electric confinement in condensed matter
- Single Dirac Fermions on a Lattice: A Unified View of Chiral and Parity Anomalies in Condensed Matter
- Symmetry considerations in chirality-induced spin selectivity
BibTeX
@misc{puebla2026chirality,
title = {{Chirality in Condensed Matter: Symmetry, Waves, and Quasiparticles}},
author = {Jorge Puebla and Jun-ichiro Kishine and Masashi Shiraishi and Konstantin Y. Bliokh},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = sep,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2609.12434},
eprint = {2609.12434},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.12434},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Chirality in Condensed Matter: Symmetry, Waves, and Quasiparticles
AU - Jorge Puebla
AU - Jun-ichiro Kishine
AU - Masashi Shiraishi
AU - Konstantin Y. Bliokh
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/09/11
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2609.12434
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.12434
AB - Chirality has become a recurring concept throughout condensed-matter physics, appearing in contexts ranging from optical activity and chiral phonons to magnetic excitations and hybrid quasiparticles. As its use has expanded, however, the concept has often become intertwined with related notions such as angular momentum, polarization, helicity, and nonreciprocity, obscuring its precise symmetry-based meaning. Although chirality is universally associated with broken spatial-inversion (π«) symmetry and preserved time-reversal (π―) symmetry, its physical manifestation and quantitative characterization strongly depend on the system and phenomenon under consideration. In this review, we examine chirality across photons, phonons, magnons, and hybrid excitations. We show that, while no universal measure of chirality exists, different physical systems admit different π«-odd and π―-even quantities that characterize specific chiral phenomena. We further argue that chirality is often best understood through chirality-selective interactions between waves, matter, and quasiparticles rather than as an intrinsic property of isolated excitations. From this perspective, hybridization provides a particularly promising setting for the emergence, transfer, and control of chirality in condensed-matter systems.
ER -