Abstract
Guiding energy deliberately is one of the central elements in engineering and information processing. It is often achieved by designing specific transport channels in a suitable material. Topological metamaterials offer a way to construct stable and efficient channels of unprecedented versatility. However, due to their stability it can be tricky to terminate them or to temporarily shut them off without changing the material properties massively. While a lot of effort was put into realizing mechanical topological metamaterials, almost no works deal with manipulating their edge channels in sight of applications. Here, we take a step in this direction, by taking advantage of local symmetry breaking potentials to build a switchable topological phonon channel.
Highlights
The kinds of disorder the energy transport is immune to depends on the type of topology [11, 12]
There are many realizations of symmetry protected topological effects [9, 10], but all of them share the property that once the symmetry is broken, quantities building upon the topology loose their stability
We have demonstrated the implementation of a switch for topological phonon channels
Summary
The concept of topological phonon bands emerged recently as a new design principle in mechanical metamaterials [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8]. In case that no symmetry is needed, the stability of the edge channels is typically stronger as a larger set of distortions is allowed [17]. We start by studying the fully periodic system with frx = f = fry In this case there are no additional edge potentials and the ansatz p±,r,3s = e−i(kss+krr)+iωtp± further simplifies the problem, leading to the dispersion bands. In case one of the eigenvalues has modulus smaller than one and the corresponding eigenvector is compatible with the edge we are looking at, the combination (ω, k) represents an edge state [26, 27] Before we turn our attention to that, we look at the experimental implementation of the above band structures
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