• Accepted Paper

Order parameter scaling of chirality in structural phase transitions

Keita Matsubara and Kazumasa Hattori

Phys. Rev. Research - Accepted 12 November, 2026

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/nsft-tfs7

Abstract

Chirality, defined by the absence of improper spatial symmetries, has attracted considerable attention as a symmetry principle that enables characteristic electronic, transport, and lattice responses, including current-induced magnetization (CIM) and chiral-phonon splitting (CPS). Recent symmetry-based approaches have shown that structural chirality can be characterized by electric toroidal (ET) multipoles, with the ET monopole G0 and quadrupole Gu playing central roles in cubic and noncubic systems, respectively. In this paper, we investigate achiral-to-chiral (AtC) structural phase transitions driven by atomic displacements and construct G0,u as explicit functions of the displacement order parameter η using a group-theoretical approach. We show that the leading-order form of G0,u(η) is determined by the symmetry of the parent structure and the character of the displacive mode. This provides a symmetry-based classification of AtC transitions in which chirality is treated not merely as a binary property but as an induced structural order parameter with a characteristic dependence on η. Through a systematic analysis of various types of G0,u(η), we find |G0,u|∝|η|n with n=1,2,3,⋯, including high-order multipolar chirality such as n= 3, 4, and 6. We also discuss a distinct class of chirality, termed k-arm chirality, in which G0,u is formed from unequal invariant weights |ηq|2 among different arms of the ordering wave vector k. We demonstrate that, when the response is governed by the ET-multipole coupling, the leading displacement dependences of CIM and CPS follow the same power law as that of G0,u(η). We further clarify the microscopic mechanism by which AtC transitions generate chiral phonons and the associated CPS, and show that folded optical modes can also exhibit nonchiral symmetry-lowering splittings whose displacement dependence differs from that of G0,u(η). Since η evolves with temperature across the transition, the functional form of G0,u(η) governs the temperature dependence of ET-multipole-controlled CIM and CPS, providing a route to identify the symmetry of the underlying AtC transition.

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