Scientists Flip the Handedness of Atomic Vibrations With a Simple Electric Field

Inside every crystal, atoms are never truly still. They vibrate around their equilibrium positions in collective motions called phonons, and in most textbook treatments these vibrations are imagined as simple back-and-forth oscillations along straight lines. Reality, however, is stranger and far more interesting. In certain crystals, groups of atoms can rotate as they oscillate, tracing out tiny circular or helical paths that give the vibration an intrinsic handedness, much like a spinning screw. These so-called chiral phonons have captivated physicists in recent years because their handedness could, in principle, be harnessed to carry angular momentum, encode information, and mediate exotic interactions between light, spin, and matter. Now, a team of researchers has reported a decisive step toward making chiral phonons a practical, controllable resource: they have shown that the handedness of a high-energy chiral lattice vibration in the classic ferroelectric material barium titanate can be deterministically flipped simply by applying an electric field.

The work, published in Nature Materials, focuses on freestanding membranes of BaTiO3, one of the most intensively studied ferroelectric compounds in existence. Ferroelectrics possess a spontaneous electric polarization that can be reoriented between stable states by an external field, which is precisely why they dominate applications ranging from capacitors to nonvolatile memories and piezoelectric transducers. What makes BaTiO3 particularly attractive for the new experiment is that its polar state is intimately tied to a structural distortion of the crystal lattice: below its Curie temperature, the titanium ions shift off-center within their oxygen cages, breaking the symmetry of the lattice and creating the electrical polarization. Because phonons are themselves collective motions of this lattice, any manipulation of the polarization necessarily reshapes the entire vibrational landscape, including the subtle rotational motions that define chiral phonons.

The particular vibration studied here belongs to what the authors describe as the g-wave sector of the lattice dynamics, referring to a high-frequency branch of phonons whose atoms execute circular, swirling trajectories. In such modes, two conjugate forms of the vibration exist, left-handed and right-handed, which are mirror images of one another but otherwise identical in energy. In an unperturbed crystal that lacks a handedness of its own, these two forms are degenerate, meaning they coexist in equal measure and no net chirality is expressed. To observe or use chiral phonons, one therefore needs a way to break this degeneracy, to make the crystal prefer one rotational sense over the other, and, crucially, to switch that preference on demand. The new study demonstrates that in BaTiO3 membranes, the ferroelectric polarization does exactly this job, acting as an internal, field-tunable chiral axis for the lattice.

Demonstrating such control experimentally is far from trivial. Chiral phonons vibrate at frequencies of terahertz order, far too fast for conventional spectroscopies to resolve directly, and their signatures are embedded deep within the vibrational spectrum of the crystal. The technique of choice in this study was circularly dichroic resonant inelastic X-ray scattering, an advanced synchrotron method that combines the momentum-resolving power of inelastic X-ray scattering with the chiral sensitivity of circularly polarized light. In this scheme, an incoming X-ray photon tuned to an absorption edge of a constituent atom transfers a well-defined portion of its energy and momentum to the lattice, exciting a specific phonon, and the scattered photon is analyzed for its energy loss. By measuring how efficiently the phonon is excited when the X-ray beam’s circular polarization is reversed, researchers can determine the phonon’s own handedness with remarkable selectivity, effectively interrogating the crystal with one rotating probe to detect rotating excitations.

Using this approach on their BaTiO3 membranes, the researchers recorded phonon spectra with circularly polarized X-rays tuned to the titanium absorption edge and observed a clear dichroic signal at the energy of the g-wave phonon. The sign of this signal, which encodes the phonon’s chirality, flipped when the ferroelectric polarization of the membrane was reversed by an applied electric field. This is the central experimental result: the handedness of the lattice vibration is not a fixed property of the material but a state that follows the polarization direction and can be rewritten at will. Because ferroelectric polarization is nonvolatile, retaining its orientation after the field is removed, the phonon chirality it selects is likewise nonvolatile, opening a conceptual pathway toward devices in which information is stored in the rotational sense of atomic motion rather than in charge, spin, or conventional polarization alone.

The physics underlying this switching can be understood through the lens of symmetry. In the ferroelectric phase of BaTiO3, the off-center displacement of the titanium ions lowers the crystal symmetry and establishes a polar axis, transforming the material from an achiral environment into one that distinguishes between clockwise and counterclockwise rotation along that axis. The g-wave phonon’s circular atomic trajectories then couple differently to this polar lattice depending on their handedness, lifting the degeneracy between the left- and right-handed forms and determining which one dominates the measured dichroic response. When the electric field reverses the polarization, the symmetry operation connecting the two states acts like a mirror that interchanges the two chiralities, and the phonon population follows. The experiment thus provides a direct, momentum-resolved picture of how a macroscopic order parameter in a ferroelectric governs the microscopic rotation of atoms, a connection that had been theorized but was extraordinarily difficult to verify until the advent of chiral-sensitive inelastic X-ray techniques.

The significance of the result extends well beyond barium titanate itself. Chiral phonons have been proposed as carriers of angular momentum that can be transferred to electron spins, as mediators of a phonon contribution to the Edelstein and inverse Edelstein effects, and as a route to phonon-controlled magnetism in so-called phonon-magnetic materials. They also underpin emerging proposals for chiral phononics, in which the handedness of vibrations serves as an information carrier immune to some of the noise and leakage channels that plague charge-based electronics. What all of these proposals require is an efficient, reversible, and preferably electrically driven mechanism for writing and erasing phonon chirality. The demonstration that a ferroelectric gate can fulfill this role in a technologically mature material suggests that such mechanisms are not exotic laboratory curiosities but achievable engineering primitives.

The choice of freestanding membranes as the sample geometry is also consequential. Thin, released membranes of complex oxides can sustain electric fields and strain states that are difficult to impose in bulk crystals, and their reduced thickness minimizes the absorption and scattering losses that complicate soft X-ray measurements. In the study, the membrane format allowed the researchers to apply the switching field while maintaining optical access for the resonant scattering experiment, and it is consistent with the broader trend of integrating oxide ferroelectrics into thin-film heterostructures for next-generation electronic devices. The combination of a classic ferroelectric, a state-of-the-art synchrotron probe, and device-relevant sample geometry gives the result an unusually direct line from fundamental symmetry physics to potential applications.

Looking forward, the findings raise a series of compelling questions. How fast can the phonon chirality follow the polarization during a switching event, and what transient chiral dynamics unfold in the intermediate states of a ferroelectric domain wall as it sweeps through the membrane? Can the same circularly dichroic scattering technique resolve the interaction between chiral phonons and other quasiparticles, such as magnons or excitons, in heterostructures that couple ferroelectric and magnetic orders? And can the electrically written chirality be read out by faster, more compact means, perhaps through chirality-dependent optical or transport responses, so that phonon-handedness memory could one day be integrated into practical circuitry? The present work does not answer all of these questions, but by establishing electric-field switching as an experimental reality, it converts many of them from speculation into concrete research programs.

For decades, ferroelectricity has been understood as the electric-field control of where atoms sit. This new result reframes that familiar story: in BaTiO3, the same field control extends to how atoms move, determining the rotational sense of their collective dance. The ability to write, erase, and read the chirality of a lattice vibration with a voltage transforms chiral phonons from a fascinating spectroscopic observation into a controllable degree of freedom of condensed matter. As synchrotron and free-electron laser facilities continue to sharpen the tools of chiral X-ray scattering, and as oxide membranes become ever more integrated into device architectures, the swirling, handed vibrations of crystals may soon find themselves at the heart of technologies that store data, process signals, and manipulate angular momentum in ways their discoverers never imagined.

Subject of Research: Electric-field control of chiral g-wave phonons in ferroelectric barium titanate membranes

Article Title: Electric-field switching of g-wave phonon chirality in ferroelectric BaTiO3

Article References: Grimes, M., Ueda, H., Allington, C. J., Romao, C. P., Kummer, K., Kaur, P., Wang, L.-S., Chang, Y.-W., Yang, J.-C., Huang, S.-W., & Staub, U. (2026). Electric-field switching of g-wave phonon chirality in ferroelectric BaTiO3. Nature Materials. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41563-026-02737-w

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1038/s41563-026-02737-w

Keywords: phonon chirality, ferroelectricity, BaTiO3, electric-field switching, resonant inelastic X-ray scattering, X-ray circular dichroism, chiral phonons, functional materials, lattice dynamics, nonvolatile memory, phononics, membranes