Ferroaxial Electronic Response to Local Lattice Rotation

Abstract

We theoretically investigate electronic responses to lattice deformation in a ferroaxial system using a tight-binding model on a two-dimensional square lattice and linear response theory. While conventional elastic responses are commonly discussed in terms of symmetric strain, the displacement gradient also contains an antisymmetric component describing a local lattice rotation. Focusing on this rotational degree of freedom, we treat the symmetric strain and antisymmetric local rotation as independent perturbations and incorporate their effects microscopically through deformation-induced modulations of the electronic hopping amplitudes. We find that the local rotation induces characteristic diagonal electric quadrupoles that are distinct from those generated by the symmetric shear strain. The rotation-induced response is dominated by the intraband contribution and increases approximately linearly with the ferroaxial crystal field, vanishing in the absence of ferroaxial order. In contrast, the symmetric-shear-induced response remains finite without ferroaxial order and contains both intraband and interband contributions. These results demonstrate that the antisymmetric local rotation provides a distinct electronic response channel characteristic of the ferroaxial state.