Robust temporal pumping in a magneto-mechanical topological insulator.
basic_science · Level V
Where this comes from
- Record sourced from PubMed, PMID 32080188.
- Also identified by DOI 10.1038/s41467-020-14804-0 and PMC identifier 7033202.
- Licence recorded as CC BY.
- The licence permits redistribution, so the abstract is shown in full and the full text is available from the publisher.
Abstract
The transport of energy through 1-dimensional (1D) waveguiding channels can be affected by sub-wavelength disorder, resulting in undesirable localization and backscattering phenomena. However, quantized disorder-resilient transport is observable in the edge currents of 2-dimensional (2D) topological band insulators with broken time-reversal symmetry. Topological pumps are able to reduce this higher-dimensional topological insulator phenomena to lower dimensionality by utilizing a pumping parameter (either space or time) as an artificial dimension. Here we demonstrate a temporal topological pump that produces on-demand, robust transport of mechanical energy using a 1D magneto-mechanical metamaterial. We experimentally demonstrate that the system is uniquely resilient to defects occurring in both space and time. Our findings open a path towards exploration of higher-dimensional topological physics with time as a synthetic dimension.