Observation of chiral edge states in gapped nanomechanical graphene

Emerging in diverse areas of physics, edge states have been exploited as an efficient strategy of manipulating electrons, photons, and phonons for next-generation hybrid electro-optomechanical circuits. Among various edge states, gapless chiral edge states harnessing quantum spin/valley Hall effects...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Science advances 2021-01, Vol.7 (2)
Main Authors: Xi, Xiang, Ma, Jingwen, Wan, Shuai, Dong, Chun-Hua, Sun, Xiankai
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Applied Physics
Materials Science
SciAdv r-articles
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:Emerging in diverse areas of physics, edge states have been exploited as an efficient strategy of manipulating electrons, photons, and phonons for next-generation hybrid electro-optomechanical circuits. Among various edge states, gapless chiral edge states harnessing quantum spin/valley Hall effects in graphene or graphene-like materials are especially unique. Here, we report on an experimental demonstration of chiral edge states in gapped "nanomechanical graphene"-a honeycomb lattice of free-standing silicon nitride nanomechanical membranes with broken spatial inversion symmetry. These chiral edge states can emerge from the conventional flat-band edge states by tuning the on-site boundary potentials. We experimentally demonstrated that they are backscattering-immune against sharp bends and exhibit the "valley-momentum locking" effect. We further realized smooth transition between the chiral edge states and the well-known valley kink states. Our results open the door to experimental investigation of exotic graphene-related physics in the very-high-frequency integrated nanomechanical systems.
ISSN:2375-2548
2375-2548
DOI:10.1126/sciadv.abe1398