A soft-clamped topological waveguide for phonons

Xiang Xi (), Ilia Chernobrovkin, Jan Košata, Mads B. Kristensen, Eric Langman, Anders S. Sørensen, Oded Zilberberg and Albert Schliesser ()
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Xiang Xi: University of Copenhagen
Ilia Chernobrovkin: University of Copenhagen
Jan Košata: ETH Zürich
Mads B. Kristensen: University of Copenhagen
Eric Langman: University of Copenhagen
Anders S. Sørensen: University of Copenhagen
Oded Zilberberg: University of Konstanz
Albert Schliesser: University of Copenhagen

Nature, 2025, vol. 642, issue 8069, 947-953

Abstract: Abstract Topological insulators were originally discovered for electron waves in condensed-matter systems. Recently, this concept has been transferred to bosonic systems such as photons1 and phonons2, which propagate in materials patterned with artificial lattices that emulate spin-Hall physics. This work has been motivated, in part, by the prospect of topologically protected transport along edge channels in on-chip circuits2,3. In principle, topology protects propagation against backscattering, but not against loss, which has remained limited to the dB cm−1 level for phononic waveguides, whether topological4–7 or not8–19. Here we combine advanced dissipation engineering20—in particular, the recently introduced method of soft clamping21—with the concept of valley-Hall topological insulators for phonons22–26. This enables on-chip phononic waveguides with propagation losses due to dissipation of 3 dB km−1 at room temperature, orders of magnitude below any previous chip-scale devices. The low losses also allow us to accurately quantify backscattering protection in topological phononic waveguides, using high-resolution ultrasound spectroscopy. We infer that phonons follow a sharp, 120° bend with a 99.99% probability instead of being scattered back, and less than one phonon in a million is lost. Our work will inspire new research directions on ultralow-loss phononic waveguides and will provide a clean bosonic system for investigating topological protection and non-Hermitian topological physics.

Date: 2025
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DOI: 10.1038/s41586-025-09092-x

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