Home > Research > Publications & Outputs > Sonic Landau Levels and Synthetic Gauge Fields ...

Electronic data

  • authorpreprint

    Rights statement: © 2017 American Physical Society

    Accepted author manuscript, 3.34 MB, PDF document

    Available under license: CC BY-NC: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License

Links

Text available via DOI:

View graph of relations

Sonic Landau Levels and Synthetic Gauge Fields in Mechanical Metamaterials

Research output: Contribution to Journal/MagazineJournal articlepeer-review

Published
Close
Article number195502
<mark>Journal publication date</mark>10/11/2017
<mark>Journal</mark>Physical review letters
Volume119
Number of pages6
Publication StatusPublished
<mark>Original language</mark>English

Abstract

Mechanical strain can lead to a synthetic gauge field that controls the dynamics of electrons in graphene sheets as well as light in photonic crystals. Here, we show how to engineer an analogous synthetic gauge field for lattice vibrations. Our approach relies on one of two strategies: shearing a honeycomb lattice of
masses and springs or patterning its local material stiffness. As a result, vibrational spectra with discrete Landau levels are generated. Upon tuning the strength of the gauge field, we can control the density of states and transverse spatial confinement of sound in the metamaterial. We also show how this gauge field can be used to design waveguides in which sound propagates with robustness against disorder as a consequence of the change in topological polarization that occurs along a domain wall. By introducing dissipation, we can selectively enhance the domain-wall-bound topological sound mode, a feature that may potentially be exploited for the design of sound amplification by stimulated emission of radiation (SASER, the mechanical analogs of lasers).

Bibliographic note

© 2017 American Physical Society