Science Daily  January 25, 2024 The concept of topological phases is rather abstract, and the characterization of the spectral topology of mechanical structures has intrinsically relied on the a priori knowledge of idealized theoretical models. An international team of researchers (USA – University of Pennsylvania, the Netherlands, France) introduced and validated an experimental method to detect the topologically protected zero modes of mechanical structures without resorting to any modeling step. The method is based on a simple electrostatic analogy: Topological zero modes are akin to electric charges. To detect them, they identified elementary mechanical molecules and measured their chiral polarization. […]