Project description:The interplay between chirality and topology nurtures many exotic electronic properties. For instance, topological chiral semimetals display multifold chiral fermions that manifest nontrivial topological charge and spin texture. They are an ideal playground for exploring chirality-driven exotic physical phenomena. In this work, we reveal a monopole-like orbital-momentum locking texture on the three-dimensional Fermi surfaces of topological chiral semimetals with B20 structures (e.g., RhSi and PdGa). This orbital texture enables a large orbital Hall effect (OHE) and a giant orbital magnetoelectric (OME) effect in the presence of current flow. Different enantiomers exhibit the same OHE which can be converted to the spin Hall effect by spin-orbit coupling in materials. In contrast, the OME effect is chirality-dependent and much larger than its spin counterpart. Our work reveals the crucial role of orbital texture for understanding OHE and OME effects in topological chiral semimetals and paves the path for applications in orbitronics, spintronics, and enantiomer recognition.
Project description:The introduction of ferromagnetic order in topological insulators in general breaks the time-reversal symmetry and a gap is opened in topological surface bands. Various studies have focused on gap-opened magnetic topological insulators, because such modified band structures provide a promising platform for observing exotic quantum physics. However, the role of antiferromagnetic order in topological insulators is still controversial. In this report, we demonstrate that it is possible to restore the topological surface states by effectively reducing the antiferromagnetic ordering in Gd-substituted Bi2Te3. We successfully control the magnetic impurities via thermal treatments in ultra-high vacuum condition and observe apparent restoration of topological surface band dispersions. The microscopic mechanism of atomic rearrangements and the restoration process of topological surface states are unraveled by the combination of scanning tunneling microscopy measurements and density functional theory calculations. This work provides an effective way to control the magnetic impurities which is strongly correlated with topological surface states.
Project description:Berry phase associated with energy bands in crystals can lead to quantised observables like quantised dipole polarizations in one-dimensional topological insulators. Recent theories have generalised the concept of quantised dipoles to multipoles, resulting in the discovery of multipole topological insulators which exhibit a hierarchy of multipole topology: a quantised octupole moment in a three-dimensional bulk induces quantised quadrupole moments on its two-dimensional surfaces, which in turn induce quantised dipole moments on one-dimensional hinges. Here, we report on the realisation of an octupole topological insulator in a three-dimensional acoustic metamaterial. We observe zero-dimensional topological corner states, one-dimensional gapped hinge states, two-dimensional gapped surface states, and three-dimensional gapped bulk states, representing the hierarchy of octupole, quadrupole and dipole moments. Conditions for forming a nontrivial octupole moment are demonstrated by comparisons with two different lattice configurations having trivial octupole moments. Our work establishes the multipole topology and its full hierarchy in three-dimensional geometries.
Project description:Topological insulators are a new class of materials that exhibit robust and scatter-free transport along their edges - independently of the fine details of the system and of the edge - due to topological protection. To classify the topological character of two-dimensional systems without additional symmetries, one commonly uses Chern numbers, as their sum computed from all bands below a specific bandgap is equal to the net number of chiral edge modes traversing this gap. However, this is strictly valid only in settings with static Hamiltonians. The Chern numbers do not give a full characterization of the topological properties of periodically driven systems. In our work, we implement a system where chiral edge modes exist although the Chern numbers of all bands are zero. We employ periodically driven photonic waveguide lattices and demonstrate topologically protected scatter-free edge transport in such anomalous Floquet topological insulators.
Project description:Topological elastic metamaterials offer insight into classic motion law and open up opportunities in quantum and classic information processing. Theoretical modeling and numerical simulation of elastic topological states have been reported, whereas the experimental observation remains relatively unexplored. Here we present an experimental observation and numerical simulation of tunable topological states in soft elastic metamaterials. The on-demand reversible switch in topological phase has been achieved by changing filling ratio, tension, and/or compression of the elastic metamaterials. By combining two elastic metamaterials with distinct topological invariants, we further demonstrate the formation and dynamic tunability of topological interface states by mechanical deformation, and the manipulation of elastic wave propagation. Moreover, we provide a topological phase diagram of elastic metamaterials under deformation. Our approach to dynamically control interface states in soft materials paves the way to various phononic systems involving thermal management and soft robotics requiring better use of energy.
Project description:Topological dislocation modes resulting from the interplay between spatial dislocations and momentum-space topology have recently attracted significant interest. Here, we theoretically and experimentally demonstrate time-dislocation topological modes which are induced by the interplay between temporal dislocations and Floquet-band topology. By utilizing an extra physical dimension to represent the frequency-space lattice, we implement a two-dimensional Floquet higher-order topological phase and observe time-dislocation induced π-mode topological corner modes in a three-dimensional circuit metamaterial. Intriguingly, the realized time-dislocation topological modes exhibit spatial localization at the temporal dislocation, despite homogeneous in-plane lattice couplings across it. Our study opens a new avenue to explore the topological phenomena enabled by the interplay between real-space, time-space and momentum-space topology.
Project description:When reflected from an interface, a laser beam generally drifts and tilts away from the path predicted by ray optics, an intriguing consequence of its finite transverse extent. For twisted light, such beam shifts manifest even more dramatically: upon reflection, a field containing a high-order optical vortex is expected to experience not only geometrical shifts, but an additional splitting of its high-order vortex into a constellation of unit-charge vortices, a phenomenon known as topological aberration. In this article, we report on the experimental observation of the topological aberration effect, verified through the deformation of vortex constellations upon reflection. We develop a general theoretical framework to study topological aberrations in terms of the elementary symmetric polynomials of the coordinates of a vortex constellation, a mathematical abstraction which we prove to be the physical quantity of practical interest.
Project description:Higher-order topological insulators (HOTIs) are unique materials hosting topologically protected states, whose dimensionality is at least by 2 lower than that of the bulk. Topological states in such insulators may be strongly confined in their corners which leads to considerable enhancement of nonlinear processes involving such states. However, all nonlinear HOTIs demonstrated so far were built on periodic bulk lattice materials. Here, we demonstrate the first nonlinear photonic HOTI with the fractal origin. Despite their fractional effective dimensionality, the HOTIs constructed here on two different types of the Sierpiński gasket waveguide arrays, may support topological corner states for unexpectedly wide range of coupling strengths, even in parameter regions where conventional HOTIs become trivial. We demonstrate thresholdless spatial solitons bifurcating from corner states in nonlinear fractal HOTIs and show that their localization can be efficiently controlled by the input beam power. We observe sharp differences in nonlinear light localization on outer and multiple inner corners and edges representative for these fractal materials. Our findings not only represent a new paradigm for nonlinear topological insulators, but also open new avenues for potential applications of fractal materials to control the light flow.
Project description:The quantized bulk quadrupole moment has so far revealed a non-trivial boundary state with lower-dimensional topological edge states and in-gap zero-dimensional corner modes. In contrast to photonic implementations, state-of-the-art strategies for topological thermal metamaterials struggle to achieve such higher-order hierarchical features. This is due to the absence of quantized bulk quadrupole moments in thermal diffusion fundamentally prohibiting possible band topology expansions. Here, we report a recipe for generating quantized bulk quadrupole moments in fluid heat transport and observe the quadrupole topological phases in non-Hermitian thermal systems. Our experiments show that both the real- and imaginary-valued bands exhibit the hierarchical features of bulk, gapped edge and in-gap corner states-in stark contrast to the higher-order states observed only on real-valued bands in classical wave fields. Our findings open up unique possibilities for diffusive metamaterial engineering and establish a playground for multipolar topological physics.
Project description:The discovery of novel topological states has served as a major branch in physics and material sciences. To date, most of the established topological states have been employed in Euclidean systems. Recently, the experimental realization of the hyperbolic lattice, which is the regular tessellation in non-Euclidean space with a constant negative curvature, has attracted much attention. Here, we demonstrate both in theory and experiment that exotic topological states can exist in engineered hyperbolic lattices with unique properties compared to their Euclidean counterparts. Based on the extended Haldane model, the boundary-dominated first-order Chern edge state with a nontrivial real-space Chern number is achieved. Furthermore, we show that the fractal-like midgap higher-order zero modes appear in deformed hyperbolic lattices, and the number of zero modes increases exponentially with the lattice size. These novel topological states are observed in designed hyperbolic circuit networks by measuring site-resolved impedance responses and dynamics of voltage packets. Our findings suggest a useful platform to study topological phases beyond Euclidean space, and may have potential applications in the field of high-efficient topological devices, such as topological lasers, with enhanced edge responses.