Research progress of elastic topological materials

Abstract

Topological insulators, originated in quantum systems, are recently generalized to electromagnetic, acoustic, and elastic wave fields due to interesting wave controlling provides, such as unidirectional and dissipationless energy transportation. This new kind of materials provide unprecedented possibilities for engineering wave flows. This paper will introduce the basic theory of topological insulators and summarize the research progress of topological insulators in elastic fields. Based on one-dimensional and two-dimensional discrete models, preliminary concepts of topological insulators, such as Dirac cone, band inversion, Berry curvatures, topological invariants, are introduced. The design and progress of valley Hall insulators, Chern insulators as well as spin Hall insulators are introduced afterward, followed by discussions on high-order topological insulators. The last part of this paper covers topological phenomena in static mechanics, including topological solitons and toplogical zero energy modes.