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On-chip valley topological materials for elastic wave manipulation

Nature Materials volume 17, pages 993–998 (2018)Cite this article

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Abstract

Valley topological materials, in which electrons possess valley pseudospin, have attracted a growing interest recently. The additional valley degree of freedom offers a great potential for its use in information encoding and processing. The valley pseudospin and valley edge transport have been investigated in photonic and phononic crystals for electromagnetic and acoustic waves, respectively. In this work, by using a micromanufacturing technology, valley topological materials are fabricated on silicon chips, which allows the observation of gyral valley states and valley edge transport for elastic waves. The edge states protected by the valley topology are robust against the bending and weak randomness of the channel between distinct valley Hall phases. At the channel intersection, a counterintuitive partition of the valley edge states manifests for elastic waves, in which the partition ratio can be freely adjusted. These results may enable the creation of on-chip high-performance micro-ultrasonic materials and devices.

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Fig. 1: Microfabricated PC on a silicon chip.
Fig. 2: Valley gyral states.
Fig. 3: Phase diagram and valley projected edge states.
Fig. 4: Experimental demonstration of edge states and the reflection immunity.
Fig. 5: Partition of the edge states at topological channel intersections.

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Data availability

The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.

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Acknowledgements

We thank J. Li and B. Miao for micro fabrication. We thank S. Yin for scanning electron microscope. This work is supported by the National Key R&D Program of China (grant no. 2018FYA0305800), the National Basic Research Program of China (grant no. 2015CB755500), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (grant nos 11804101, 11572318, 11604102, 11774275 and 11704128), Guangdong Innovative and Entrepreneurial Research Team Program (grant no. 2016ZT06C594) and the National Postdoctoral Program for Innovative Talents (BX201600054 and BX201700082).

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Author notes

  1. These authors contributed equally: Mou Yan, Jiuyang Lu, Feng Li

Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Physics and Optoelectronics, South China University of Technology, Guangzhou, Guangdong, China

    Mou Yan, Jiuyang Lu, Feng Li, Weiyin Deng, Xueqin Huang & Jiahong Ma

  2. Key Laboratory of Artificial Micro- and Nanostructures of Ministry of Education and School of Physics and Technology, Wuhan University, Wuhan, China

    Zhengyou Liu

  3. Institute for Advanced Studies, Wuhan University, Wuhan, China

    Zhengyou Liu

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Contributions

M.Y. and F.L. designed and performed the experiments. M.Y. and J.L. carried out the numerical simulations. Z.L. supervised the project. All the authors contributed to the analyses and the preparation of the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Zhengyou Liu.

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Supplementary information

Supplementary Information

Supplements A-D, Supplementary Figures 1–13, Supplementary References 1–4

K1 valley state

Displacement fields of the K1 valley state

K2 valley state

Displacement fields of the K2 valley state

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Yan, M., Lu, J., Li, F. et al. On-chip valley topological materials for elastic wave manipulation. Nature Mater 17, 993–998 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41563-018-0191-5

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