On-chip valley topological materials for elastic wave manipulation

• Published in: Nature materials Vol. 17; no. 11; pp. 993 - 998
• Main Authors: Yan, Mou, Lu, Jiuyang, Li, Feng, Deng, Weiyin, Huang, Xueqin, Ma, Jiahong, Liu, Zhengyou
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: London Nature Publishing Group UK 01-11-2018; Nature Publishing Group
• Subjects: 639/766/119/2792; 639/766/25/3927; Biomaterials; Chemistry and Materials Science; Chip formation; Condensed Matter Physics; Crystals; Elastic waves; Materials Science; Nanotechnology; Optical and Electronic Materials; Partitions; Phase transitions; Photonic crystals; Silicon wafers; Symmetry; Topology; Transport; Vortices
• ISSN: 1476-1122; 1476-4660
• DOI: 10.1038/s41563-018-0191-5

Valley topological materials, in which electrons possess valley pseudospin, have attracted a growing interest recently. The additional valley degree of freedom offers a great potential for its use in information encoding and processing. The valley pseudospin and valley edge transport have been investigated in photonic and phononic crystals for electromagnetic and acoustic waves, respectively. In this work, by using a micromanufacturing technology, valley topological materials are fabricated on silicon chips, which allows the observation of gyral valley states and valley edge transport for elastic waves. The edge states protected by the valley topology are robust against the bending and weak randomness of the channel between distinct valley Hall phases. At the channel intersection, a counterintuitive partition of the valley edge states manifests for elastic waves, in which the partition ratio can be freely adjusted. These results may enable the creation of on-chip high-performance micro-ultrasonic materials and devices.
Topologically protected edge states can be observed when combining two Si-based phononic crystals of opposite phases, as well as on-chip elastic wave splitting via partition of edges states at the intersection of topological channels.