Fermi arc surface state and topological switch in the gyromagnetic metamaterials

Abstract

A landmark feature of the Weyl system is that it possesses the Fermi arc surface states. In this work, we demonstrate that the Fermi arc surface states connect the vacuum state and the Weyl points of gyromagnetic metamaterials (GMs). The nonzero Chern numbers and Berry phases show the nontrivial topological property of the GMs in momentum space. Full-wave simulations demonstrate that the chiral surface waves on the boundary between the GMs and vacuum state can achieve robustness against sharp corners of step-type configurations. Remarkably, the topological switch can be realized by adopting the Fermi arc surface states between two different GMs. We theoretically prove that the physical mechanism of realizing topological switch is caused by different gap Chern numbers of the material system. Moreover, the direction of the topological switch can be operated by manipulating the gyromagnetic parameters of the GMs in the ‘button’ region. Our work may provide more flexibility for the flexible and robust topological devices.