Science Daily July 31, 2023
Topological pumping allows waves to navigate a sample undisturbed by disorders and defects. An international team of researchers (USA – University of Missouri, China) demonstrated this phenomenon with elastic surface waves by strategically patterning an elastic surface to create a synthetic dimension. The surface was decorated with arrays of resonating pillars that were connected by spatially slow-varying coupling bridges and support eigenmodes located below the sound cone. They established a connection between the collective dynamics of the pillars and that of electrons in a magnetic field by developing a tight-binding model and a WKB (Wentzel-Kramers-Brillouin) analysis. This enabled them to predict the topological pumping pattern, which they validated through numerical and experimental steering of waves from one edge to the other. They observed the immune nature of the topologically pumped surface waves to disorder and defects. According to the researchers the combination of surface patterning and WKB analysis provides a versatile platform for controlling surface waves and exploring topological matter in higher dimensions… read more. Open Access TECHNICAL ARTICLE
Design principle and dispersion analysis. Credit: SCIENCE ADVANCES, 28 Jul 2023, Vol 9, Issue 30