Axial-field-induced chiral channels in an acoustic Weyl system

By Valerio Peri, Marc Serra-Garcia, R. Ilan, Sebastian D. Huber. Nature Physics, 2018

139 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Condensed-matter and other engineered systems, such as cold atoms1, photonic2 or phononic metamaterials3, have proved to be versatile platforms for the observation of low-energy counterparts of elementary particles from relativistic field theories. These include the celebrated Majorana modes4, as well as Dirac5,6 and Weyl fermions7–9. An intriguing feature of the Weyl equation10 is the chiral symmetry, where the two chiral sectors have an independent gauge freedom. Although this freedom leads to a quantum anomaly11–15, there is no corresponding axial background field coupling differently to opposite chiralities in quantum electrodynamics. Here, we provide the experimental characterization of the effect of such an axial field in an acoustic metamaterial. We implement the axial field through an inhomogeneous potential16 and observe the induced chiral Landau levels. From the metamaterials perspective these chiral channels open the possibility for the observation of non-local Weyl orbits17 and might enable unidirectional bulk transport in a time-reversal-invariant system18.Axial fields couple to the states of different chiralities with opposite signs. In an acoustic Weyl system, the implementation of such fields induces chiral Landau levels, which is now observed experimentally.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Condensed Matter Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e14dc3a97e3a8fa9d8078a6496a000cafc65dffa

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In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

  1. Baile Zhang
  2. Haoran Xue
  3. Yihao Yang

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