Quantum Optical Spin Dispersion in Chiral Tellurium Lattice

Quantum photonic devices benefit from routing, storing, and measuring single photons by their helicity, enabling directional emission, low crosstalk qubit interfaces, and on-chip polarization control. However, progress is limited by weak chiral light–matter coupling in common dielectrics, and local response models that ignore lattice scale spatial dispersion. Tellurium is a non-centrosymmetric semiconductor with intrinsic chirality and strong optical activity, making it a promising spin photonic medium. In our work, we develop a deep-microscopic quantum optical band theory for tellurium that systematically accounts for all reciprocal lattice momentum exchanges between the photon and the crystal. This framework yields a full nonlocal spin dispersion map of the optical modes within the lattice. We also show that the chirality of tellurium is imprinted on these optical modes as unique circularly polarized textures at sub-lattice scales. We further outline an extension toward 2D tellurium (tellurene) and discuss implications for all-dielectric THz components, such as line defect waveguides and polarization selective splitters.