Axial-field-induced chiral channels in an acoustic Weyl system

Condensed-matter and other engineered systems, such as cold atoms 1 , photonic 2 or phononic metamaterials 3 , have proved to be versatile platforms for the observation of low-energy counterparts of elementary particles from relativistic field theories. These include the celebrated Majorana modes 4...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Nature physics 2019-04, Vol.15 (4), p.357-361
Main Authors: Peri, Valerio, Serra-Garcia, Marc, Ilan, Roni, Huber, Sebastian D.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
639/301/1023/303
639/766/119/2792/4128
639/766/25/3927
Atomic
Channels
Classical and Continuum Physics
Complex Systems
Condensed Matter Physics
Elementary particles
Letter
Mathematical and Computational Physics
Metamaterials
Molecular
Optical and Plasma Physics
Physics
Physics and Astronomy
Quantum electrodynamics
Quantum theory
Relativistic particles
Relativistic theory
Theoretical
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Condensed-matter and other engineered systems, such as cold atoms 1 , photonic 2 or phononic metamaterials 3 , have proved to be versatile platforms for the observation of low-energy counterparts of elementary particles from relativistic field theories. These include the celebrated Majorana modes 4 , as well as Dirac 5 , 6 and Weyl fermions 7 – 9 . An intriguing feature of the Weyl equation 10 is the chiral symmetry, where the two chiral sectors have an independent gauge freedom. Although this freedom leads to a quantum anomaly 11 – 15 , there is no corresponding axial background field coupling differently to opposite chiralities in quantum electrodynamics. Here, we provide the experimental characterization of the effect of such an axial field in an acoustic metamaterial. We implement the axial field through an inhomogeneous potential 16 and observe the induced chiral Landau levels. From the metamaterials perspective these chiral channels open the possibility for the observation of non-local Weyl orbits 17 and might enable unidirectional bulk transport in a time-reversal-invariant system 18 . Axial fields couple to the states of different chiralities with opposite signs. In an acoustic Weyl system, the implementation of such fields induces chiral Landau levels, which is now observed experimentally.
ISSN:1745-2473
1745-2481
DOI:10.1038/s41567-019-0415-x