No Arabic abstract
Precise control of elastic waves in modes and coherences is of great use in reinforcing nowadays elastic energy harvesting/storage, nondestructive testing, wave-mater interaction, high sensitivity sensing and information processing, etc. All these implementations are expected to have elastic transmission with lower transmission losses and higher degree of freedom in transmission path. Inspired by topological states of quantum matters, especially quantum spin Hall effects (QSHEs) providing passive solutions of unique disorder-immune surface states protected by underlying nontrivial topological invariants of the bulk, thus solving severe performance trade-offs in experimentally realizable topologically ordered states. Here, we demonstrate experimentally the first elastic analogue of QSHE, by a concise phononic crystal plate with only perforated holes. Strong elastic spin-orbit coupling is realized accompanied by the first topologically-protected phononic circuits with both robustness and negligible propagation loss overcoming many circuit- and system-level performance limits induced by scattering. This elegant approach in a monolithic substrate opens up the possibility of realizing topological materials for phonons in both static and time-dependent regimes, can be immediately applied to multifarious chip-scale devices with both topological protection and massive integration, such as on-chip elastic wave-guiding, elastic splitter, elastic resonator with high quality factor, and even (pseudo-)spin filter.
Recent theoretical studies have extended the Berry phase framework to account for higher electric multipole moments, quadrupole and octupole topological phases have been proposed. Although the two-dimensional quantized quadrupole insulators have been demonstrated experimentally, octupole topological phases have not previously been observed experimentally. Here we report on the experimental realization of classical analog of octupole topological insulator in the electric circuit system. Three-dimensional topolectrical circuits for realizing such topological phases are constructed experimentally. We observe octupole topological states protected by the topology of the bulk, which are localized at the corners. Our results provide conclusive evidence of a form of robustness against disorder and deformation, which is characteristic of octupole topological insulators. Our study opens a new route toward higher-order topological phenomena in three-dimensions and paves the way for employing topolectrical circuitry to study complex topological phenomena.
For successful realization of a quantum computer, its building blocks (qubits) should be simultaneously scalable and sufficiently protected from environmental noise. Recently, a novel approach to the protection of superconducting qubits has been proposed. The idea is to prevent errors at the hardware level, by building a fault-free (topologically protected) logical qubit from faulty physical qubits with properly engineered interactions between them. It has been predicted that the decoupling of a protected logical qubit from local noises would grow exponentially with the number of physical qubits. Here we report on the proof-of-concept experiments with a prototype device which consists of twelve physical qubits made of nanoscale Josephson junctions. We observed that due to properly tuned quantum fluctuations, this qubit is protected against magnetic flux variations well beyond linear order, in agreement with theoretical predictions. These results demonstrate the feasibility of topologically protected superconducting qubits.
The modern theory of electric polarization in crystals associates the dipole moment of an insulator with a Berry phase of its electronic ground state [1, 2]. This concept constituted a breakthrough that not only solved the long-standing puzzle of how to calculate dipole moments in crystals, but also lies at the core of the theory of topological band structures in insulators and superconductors, including the quantum anomalous Hall insulator [3, 4] and the quantum spin Hall insulator [5-7], as well as quantized adiabatic pumping processes [8-10]. A recent theoretical proposal extended the Berry phase framework to account for higher electric multipole moments [11], revealing the existence of topological phases that have not previously been observed. Here we demonstrate the first member of this predicted class -a quantized quadrupole topological insulator- experimentally produced using a GHz-frequency reconfigurable microwave circuit. We confirm the non-trivial topological phase through both spectroscopic measurements, as well as with the identification of corner states that are manifested as a result of the bulk topology. We additionally test a critical prediction that these corner states are protected by the topology of the bulk, and not due to surface artifacts, by deforming the edge between the topological and trivial regimes. Our results provide conclusive evidence of a unique form of robustness which has never previously been observed.
The question whether the mixed phase of a gapless superconductor can support a Landau level is a celebrated problem in the context of textit{d}-wave superconductivity, with a negative answer: The scattering of the subgap excitations (massless Dirac fermions) by the vortex lattice obscures the Landau level quantization. Here we show that the same question has a positive answer for a Weyl superconductor: The chirality of the Weyl fermions protects the zeroth Landau level by means of a topological index theorem. As a result, the heat conductance parallel to the magnetic field has the universal value $G=tfrac{1}{2}g_0 Phi/Phi_0$, with $Phi$ the magnetic flux through the system, $Phi_0$ the superconducting flux quantum, and $g_0$ the thermal conductance quantum.
We show that trapped ions can be used to simulate a highly symmetrical Hamiltonian with eingenstates naturally protected against local sources of decoherence. This Hamiltonian involves long range coupling between particles and provides a more efficient protection than nearest neighbor models discussed in previous works. Our results open the perspective of experimentally realizing in controlled atomic systems, complex entangled states with decoherence times up to nine orders of magnitude longer than isolated quantum systems.