Phononic topological insulators with tunable pseudospin physics

Abstract

Efficient control of phonons is crucial to energy-information technology, but limited by the lacking of tunable degrees of freedom like charge or spin. Here we suggest to utilize crystalline symmetry-protected pseudospins as new quantum degrees of freedom to manipulate phonons. Remarkably, we reveal a duality between phonon pseudospins and electron spins by presenting Kramers-like degeneracy and pseudospin counterparts of spin-orbit coupling, which lays the foundation for "pseudospin phononics". Furthermore, we report two types of three-dimensional phononic topological insulators, which give topologically protected, gapless surface states with linear and quadratic band degeneracies, respectively. These topological surface states display unconventional phonon transport behaviors attributed to the unique pseudospin-momentum locking, which are useful for phononic circuits, transistors, antennas, etc. The emerging pseudospin physics offers new opportunities to develop future phononics.

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Cited by in corpus (6)

• Kekule Lattice in Graphdiyne: Coexistence of Phononic and Electronic Higher-Order Band Topology
• Elastic Valley Spin Controlled Chiral Coupling in Topological Valley Phononic Crystals
• Dirac phonons in two-dimensional materials
• Topological effects of phonons in GaN and AlxGa1-xN: A potential perspective for tuning phonon transport
• Phonon Weyl points and chiral edge modes with unconventional Fermi arcs in NbSi${}_2$
• Theory of Superconductivity Mediated by Topological Phonons