Switchable topological phonon channels

Abstract

Guiding energy deliberately is one of the central elements in engineering and information processing. It is often achieved by designing specific transport channels in a suitable material. Topological metamaterials offer a way to construct stable and efficient channels of unprecedented versatility. However, due to their stability it can be tricky to terminate them or to temporarily shut them off without changing the material properties massively. While a lot of effort was put into realizing mechanical topological metamaterials, almost no works deal with manipulating their edge channels in sight of applications. Here, we take a step in this direction, by taking advantage of local symmetry breaking potentials to build a switchable topological phonon channel.

6 pages, 4 figures; Submitted to New Journal of Physics focus issue on Topological Mechanics

References in corpus (8)

• Quantum Spin Hall Insulator State in HgTe Quantum Wells
• Topological Acoustics
• Observation of phononic helical edge states in a mechanical 'topological insulator'
• Time Reversal Polarization and a Z_2 Adiabatic Spin Pump
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• Topological modes bound to dislocations in mechanical metamaterials
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• The Colored Hofstadter Butterfly for the Honeycomb Lattice

Cited by in corpus (12)

• Non-Hermitian Floquet topological phases with arbitrarily many real-quasienergy edge states
• Reconfigurable topological phases in next-nearest-neighbor coupled resonator lattices
• Topological Phononic Logic
• Floquet topological phases in a spin-1/2 double kicked rotor
• Topological networks for quantum communication between distant qubits
• Recipe for creating an arbitrary number of Floquet chiral edge states
• Non-Hermitian Floquet topological phases in the double-kicked rotor
• A computational study of two-terminal transport of Floquet quantum Hall insulators
• Floquet topological phases with fourfold-degenerate edge modes in a driven spin-1/2 Creutz ladder
• Supersymmetry on the lattice: Geometry, Topology, and Flat Bands
• Realization of programmable nanomechanical lattice with both nearest-neighboring and next-nearest-neighboring couplings
• Strain Tunable Phononic Topological Bandgaps in Two-Dimensional Hexagonal Boron Nitride