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research article

Anomalous topological waves in strongly amorphous scattering networks

Zhang, Zhe
•
Delplace, Pierre
•
Fleury, Romain  
March 22, 2023
Science Advances

Topological insulators are crystalline materials that have revolutionized our ability to control wave transport. They provide us with unidirectional channels that are immune to obstacles, defects, or local disorder and can even survive some random deformations of their crystalline structures. However, they always break down when the level of disorder or amorphism gets too large, transitioning to a topologically trivial Anderson insulating phase. We demonstrate a two-dimensional amorphous topological regime that survives arbitrarily strong levels of amorphism. We implement it for electromagnetic waves in a nonreciprocal scattering network and experimentally demonstrate the existence of unidirectional edge transport in the strong amorphous limit. This edge transport is shown to be mediated by an anomalous edge state whose topological origin is evidenced by direct topological invariant measurements. Our findings extend the reach of topological physics to a class of systems in which strong amorphism can induce, enhance, and guarantee the topological edge transport instead of impeding it.

  • Details
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Type
research article
DOI
10.1126/sciadv.adg3186
Author(s)
Zhang, Zhe
Delplace, Pierre
Fleury, Romain  
Date Issued

2023-03-22

Published in
Science Advances
Volume

9

Issue

12

Subjects

scattering

•

networks

•

topological insulators

•

metamaterials

•

microwaves

•

amorphous systems

Editorial or Peer reviewed

REVIEWED

Written at

EPFL

EPFL units
LWE  
FunderGrant Number

Swiss federal funding

MB22.00028

FNS

181232

RelationURL/DOI

IsSupplementedBy

https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7590803
Available on Infoscience
March 27, 2023
Use this identifier to reference this record
https://infoscience.epfl.ch/handle/20.500.14299/196582
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