Observation of symmetry-protected corner states in breathing honeycomb topolectrical circuits

Abstract

We report the experimental observation of second-order corner states in a two-dimensional breathing honeycomb topolectrical circuit with sixfold rotational symmetry C6 through voltage measurements. The topological corner states originate from the nontrivial bulk topology, which can be characterized by the topological invariant associated with the rotation eigenspectrum. We confirm two types of corner states, both originate from the C6 symmetry, while one of them is specially pinned to zero admittance because of the emerging chiral symmetry protection. We then examine the robustness of zero modes in the presence of next-nearest-neighbor hopping terms that destroy chiral symmetry but still preserve C6 symmetry. Our work provides a paradigm in circuit systems to study the exotic topological physics.