Acoustic spin-Chern insulator induced by synthetic spin–orbit coupling with spin conservation breaking

Weiyin Deng, Xueqin Huang, Jiuyang Lu, Valerio Peri, Feng Li (), Sebastian D. Huber and Zhengyou Liu ()
Additional contact information
Weiyin Deng: South China University of Technology, Guangzhou
Xueqin Huang: South China University of Technology, Guangzhou
Jiuyang Lu: South China University of Technology, Guangzhou
Valerio Peri: ETH Zurich
Feng Li: South China University of Technology, Guangzhou
Sebastian D. Huber: ETH Zurich
Zhengyou Liu: Wuhan University

Nature Communications, 2020, vol. 11, issue 1, 1-7

Abstract: Abstract Topologically protected surface modes of classical waves hold the promise to enable a variety of applications ranging from robust transport of energy to reliable information processing networks. However, both the route of implementing an analogue of the quantum Hall effect as well as the quantum spin Hall effect are obstructed for acoustics by the requirement of a magnetic field, or the presence of fermionic quantum statistics, respectively. Here, we construct a two-dimensional topological acoustic crystal induced by the synthetic spin-orbit coupling, a crucial ingredient of topological insulators, with spin non-conservation. Our setup allows us to free ourselves of symmetry constraints as we rely on the concept of a non-vanishing “spin” Chern number. We experimentally characterize the emerging boundary states which we show to be gapless and helical. More importantly, we observe the spin flipping transport in an H-shaped device, demonstrating evidently the spin non-conservation of the boundary states.

Date: 2020
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-17039-1 Abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natcom:v:11:y:2020:i:1:d:10.1038_s41467-020-17039-1

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/ncomms/

DOI: 10.1038/s41467-020-17039-1

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Communications is currently edited by Nathalie Le Bot, Enda Bergin and Fiona Gillespie

More articles in Nature Communications from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().