SPICE Workshop on Chiral Phonons, July 29th - 31st 2025
Jeremy Johnson
We create a circularly polarized THz pump pulse by combining a pair of orthogonal THz pulses with appropriate relative delay. This circular drive launches a chiral phonon-polariton and we probe the time-reversal symmetry breaking response with the ultrafast Faraday effect. Modeling the response, we show contributions from electronic (inverse Faraday effect) and ionic (phonon-magnetic) degrees of freedom, and how these contributions change as more vibrational degrees of freedom are simultaneously excited.