The classical field description of “phonon spin” relies on the invariance of a continuous elastic field under infinitesimal rotation. However, a local “medium element” in the continuous field may contain large numbers of vibrational particles at microscopic level, like for complex lattices with many atoms in a unit cell. We find this causes the phonon spin in real materials no longer a simple sum of each atom rotation, but a collective interference of many atoms, since phonons are phase-coherent vibrational modes across unit cells. We demonstrate the collective interference phonon spin manifested as the dipole moment rotation (DMR) of charge-polarized unit cell, by deriving the infrared circular dichroism (ICD) with phonon-photon interaction in complex lattices. We compare the DMR with the local atom rotation without interference, and exemplify their distinct ICD spectrum in a chiral lattice model and two realistic chiral materials. Detectable ICD measurements are proposed in $\alpha$ quartz with Weyl phonon near $\mathrm{\Gamma }$ point. Our study underlies the important role of collective interference and uncovers a deeper insight of phonon spin in real materials with complex lattices.

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• Phonons
• Angular momentum
• Elastic wave theory
• First-principles calculations
• Second quantization