Phys.org November 19, 2020
An international team of researchers (Israel, Los Alamos) found a way to mimic non-Newtonian behavior in mechanical systems, and thereby develop a mechanical implementation for some of the more intractable topological quantum systems, which may offer fundamentally new insights into both the mechanical and quantum topological systems. The unit cells in a mechanical lattice are subjected to active feedback forces that are processed through autonomous controllers, pre-programmed to generate the desired local response in real-time. They demonstrated that the required topological phase, characterized by chiral edge modes, can be achieved in an analogous mechanical system only with closed-loop control. The complex-valued couplings are polarized in a way that modes on opposite edges of a lattice propagate in the same direction and are balanced by counter-propagating diffusive bulk modes. The proposed method is general and flexible, and could be used to realize arbitrary lattice parameters, such as non-local or nonlinear couplings, time dependent potentials, non-Hermitian dynamics, and more, on a single platform…read more. TECHNICAL ARTICLE
… incorporating pre-programmed controllers can enable non-Newtonian mechanical interactions. Credit: Lea Sirota