Synthetic Mechanical Lattices with Synthetic Interactions

Abstract

Metamaterials based on mechanical elements have been developed over the past decade as a powerful platform for exploring analogs of electron transport in exotic regimes that are hard to produce in real materials. In addition to enabling new physics explorations, such developments promise to advance the control over acoustic and mechanical metamaterials, and consequently to enable new capabilities for controlling the transport of sound and energy. Here, we demonstrate the building blocks of highly tunable mechanical metamaterials based on real-time measurement and feedback of modular mechanical elements. We experimentally engineer synthetic lattice Hamiltonians describing the transport of mechanical energy (phonons) in our mechanical system, with control over local site energies and loss and gain as well as control over the complex hopping between oscillators, including a natural extension to non-reciprocal hopping. Beyond linear terms, we experimentally demonstrate how this measurement-based feedback approach opens the window to independently introducing nonlinear interaction terms. Looking forward, synthetic mechanical lattices open the door to exploring phenomena related to topology, non-Hermiticity, and nonlinear dynamics in non-standard geometries, higher dimensions, and with novel multi-body interactions.

14 pages, 8 figures

References in corpus (9)

• Non-Hermitian Physics
• Observation of phononic helical edge states in a mechanical 'topological insulator'
• Topological quantum matter in synthetic dimensions
• Topological active matter
• Tunable non-reciprocal quantum transport through a dissipative Aharonov-Bohm ring in ultracold atoms
• Topological Bogoliubov excitations in inversion-symmetric systems of interacting bosons
• Quantum simulation of three-body interactions in weakly driven quantum systems
• Feedback Induced Magnetic Phases in Binary Bose-Einstein Condensates
• Anderson Molecules

Cited by in corpus (9)

• A comprehensive review on developments of synthetic dimensions
• Manipulation of Weyl Points in Reciprocal and Nonreciprocal Mechanical Lattices
• Geometric contribution to adiabatic amplification in non-Hermitian systems
• Two-dimensional lattice with an imaginary magnetic field
• Nonlinear skin breathing modes in one-dimensional nonreciprocal mechanical lattices
• Experimental Realization of Special-Unitary Operations in Classical Mechanics by Nonadiabatic Evolutions
• Mechanical cosmology: simulating scalar fluctuations in expanding Universes using synthetic mechanical lattices
• Metal-Insulator Coexistence and Gap-Crossing Domain-Wall Modes in an Aubry-André Model with Nonlocal Hopping
• Insensitive nonreciprocal edge breathers