Truly chiral phonons in α-HgS

Chirality 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. The notion of chirality in dynamical systems with broken spatial symmetry but preserved time inversion symmetry has led to the concept of truly chiral phonons. These have now been observed in bulk HgS using circularly polarized Raman spectroscopy.