Observation of phononic helical edge states in a mechanical topological insulator

By Roman Susstrunk, Sebastian D. Huber. Science, 2015

942 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Designing mechanical complexity The quantum properties of topological insulators translate to mechanical systems governed by Newton's equations of motion. Many-body interactions and the multiple degrees of freedom available to charge carriers give electronic systems a range of exotic behaviors. Süsstrunk and Huber show that this extends to mechanical systems made up of a large lattice of coupled pendula. Mechanical excitations can be eliminated from the inner part of the lattice and confined to the edges, much like topological insulators. In addition to presenting a tractable toy system in which to study complex phenomena, the approach has potential uses in vibration isolation. Science, this issue p. 47 A mechanical system can exhibit behavior analogous to a complex condensed matter system. A topological insulator, as originally proposed for electrons governed by quantum mechanics, is characterized by a dichotomy between the interior and the edge of a finite system: The bulk has an energy gap, and the edges sustain excitations traversing this gap. However, it has remained an open question whether the same physics can be observed for systems obeying Newton’s equations of motion. We conducted experiments to characterize the collective behavior of mechanical oscillators exhibiting the phenomenology of the quantum spin Hall effect. The phononic edge modes are shown to be helical, and we demonstrate their topological protection via the stability of the edge states against imperfections. Our results may enable the design of topological acoustic metamaterials that can capitalize on the stability of the surface phonons as reliable wave guides.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/6f2e1782a63ef252637968cc1bc2d8323c732dbb

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

Citations in the corpus

Observation of quadrupole transitions and edge mode topology in an LC circuit network (2018, methodology): “In this paper we report an observation of a higherorder topological transition in a quadrupole topological insulator implemented in a LC circuit model, following conventional strategies to extend the concepts of charge polarization to photonic [22] and phononic [13, 17] metamaterials.”