Suri Nishchay, Wang Chong, Zhang Yinhan, Xiao Di
Department of Physics, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 15213, United States.
Department of Materials Science and Engineering, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington 98195, United States.
Nano Lett. 2021 Dec 8;21(23):10026-10031. doi: 10.1021/acs.nanolett.1c03692. Epub 2021 Nov 16.
We discover chiral phonons at the lowest energy bands in moiré superlattices. The moiré chiral phonons we uncover are the collective excitations of the stacking domains. Their origin is uniquely attributed to the stacking configurations whose interlayer binding energy breaks the symmetry on the moiré length scale. Within elastic theory, we use a general symmetry analysis to provide a complete classification of van der Waals heterostructures in respect to hosting moiré chiral phonons and show the calculation for twisted MoS as an example. We present a low-energy effective model to qualitatively understand the moiré chiral phonons and show that it captures the essential physics remarkably well. Our result potentially opens up new possibilities in phononic twistronics as the moiré chiral phonons have high tunability, moiré scale wavelengths, excitation energies in only a few meV and can possibly be mechanically excited.
我们在莫尔超晶格的最低能带中发现了手性声子。我们所揭示的莫尔手性声子是堆叠域的集体激发。它们的起源独特地归因于层间结合能在莫尔长度尺度上打破对称性的堆叠构型。在弹性理论范围内,我们使用一般对称性分析对范德华异质结构进行了关于承载莫尔手性声子的完整分类,并以扭曲的MoS为例展示了计算过程。我们提出了一个低能有效模型来定性理解莫尔手性声子,并表明它能很好地捕捉基本物理现象。我们的结果可能为声子扭曲电子学开辟新的可能性,因为莫尔手性声子具有高可调性、莫尔尺度波长、仅几毫电子伏特的激发能量,并且可能被机械激发。