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ACOUSTICS

Audible Landau levels

Nature Physics volume 15, pages 307–308 (2019)Cite this article

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Artificial magnetic fields have been constructed in 2D and 3D acoustic structures to manipulate sound, in much the same way as Dirac and Weyl fermions respond to magnetic fields in their quantum levels.

In 1930, Lev Landau, at the age of 22, solved the quantum-mechanical problem for calculating the energy states of electrons in a uniform magnetic field and derived their quantized energy levels, known as Landau levels1. Now, writing in Nature Physics, two independent research teams led by Zhengyou Liu2 and Sebastian Huber3 report the construction of artificial magnetic fields in 2D and 3D acoustic structures to manipulate sound, leading to the observation of audible ‘acoustic Landau levels’. In particular, the acoustic Landau levels observed by Huber and colleagues in the 3D structure are chiral, meaning that they propagate unidirectionally. These findings not only offer the prospect of improved control of sound for applications such as acoustic sensing and acoustic lasing, but also provide a versatile platform for exploring intriguing magnetic-induced phenomena that are difficult to investigate in electronic systems.

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Fig. 1: Acoustic Landau levels from Dirac and Weyl systems.

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  1. Division of Physics and Applied Physics, School of Physical and Mathematical Sciences, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, Singapore

    Baile Zhang

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  1. Baile Zhang
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Correspondence to Baile Zhang.

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Zhang, B. Audible Landau levels. Nat. Phys. 15, 307–308 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41567-019-0479-7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41567-019-0479-7

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