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Waves cornered

The experimental discovery of materials known as higher-order topological insulators corroborates theoretical predictions and expands the toolbox for integrated optics and mechanical devices.
  1. Michel Fruchart

    1. Michel Fruchart is at the Lorentz Institute for Theoretical Physics, University of Leiden, 2333 Leiden, the Netherlands.

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  2. Vincenzo Vitelli

    1. Vincenzo Vitelli is at the James Frank Institute and in the Department of Physics, University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois 60637, USA.

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When waves encounter an obstacle, they are typically scattered in all directions. But at the edges of materials called topological insulators, waves are topologically protected, which means that they can propagate in spite of structural imperfections. Two papers in Nature, by Serra-Garcia et al.1 and Peterson et al.2, and a third published on the arXiv preprint server by Imhof et al.3, now report experimental evidence for a new type of topological insulator that supports protected waves at its corners, rather than at its edges. Such materials could find applications in the design of waveguides (structures that restrict wave propagation) and in integrated optics and mechanics. More importantly, they are the first confirmation of a theoretical description that could unify observations previously thought to be unrelated in condensed-matter physics4.

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Nature 555, 318-319 (2018)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-018-02868-4

References

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