Type-II Dirac points and edge transports in phononic crystal plates

Abstract

The accidentally degenerate type-II Dirac points in sonic crystal has been realized recently. However, elastic phononic crystals with type-II Dirac points have not yet been explored. In this work, we design a two-dimensional phononic crystal plate in square lattice with type-II Dirac points for elastic waves. The type-II Dirac points, different from the type-I counterparts, have the tiled dispersions and thus the iso-frequency contours become crossed lines. By tuning structures to break the mirror symmetry, the degeneracies of the type-II Dirac points are lifted, leading to a band inversion. In order to have a further explanation, we also calculate the Berry curvatures of phononic crystals with opposite structure parameters, and it turns out that these two crystals hold opposite signs around the valley. The phononic crystal plates before and after the band inversion belong to different topological valley phases, whose direct consequence is that the topologically protected gapless interface states exist between two distinct topological phases. Topologically protected interface states are found by calculating the projected band structures of a supercell that contains two kinds of interfaces between two topological phases. Robustness of the interface transport is verified by comparing the transmission rate for perfect interface with that for defective interface. Moreover, owing to the special stress field distributions of the elastic plate waves, the boundaries of a single phononic crystal phase can similarly host the gapless boundary states, which is found by calculating the projected band structures of a supercell with a single phase, thus having two free boundaries on the edges. This paper extends the two-dimensional Dirac points and valley states in graphene-like systems to the type-II cases, and obtains in the same structure the gapless interface and boundary propagations. Owing to the simple design scheme of the structure, the phononic crystal plates can be fabricated and scaled to a small size. Our system provides a feasible way of constructing high-frequency elastic wave devices.