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Acoustic Landau quantization and quantum-Hall-like edge states

Nature Physics volume 15, pages 352–356 (2019)Cite this article

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Abstract

Many intriguing phenomena occur for electrons under strong magnetic fields1,2. Recently, it was shown that an appropriate strain texture in graphene could induce a synthetic gauge field3,4,5,6, in which electrons behave as they do in a real magnetic field7,8,9,10,11. This enabled the control of quantum transport by mechanical means and allowed the unreached high-field regime to be explored. Such synthetic gauge fields have been achieved in molecular12 and photonic13 lattices. Here we report an experimental realization of a giant uniform pseudomagnetic field in acoustics by introducing a simple uniaxial deformation to the acoustic graphene. The controllability of our macroscopic platform enables us to observe the acoustic Landau levels in frequency-resolved spectroscopy and their spatial localization in pressure-field distributions. We further visualize the quantum-Hall-like edge states (connected to the zeroth Landau level), which have been elusive owing to the difficulty in creating large-area uniform pseudomagnetic fields5,6. These results, consistent with our full-wave simulations, establish a complete framework for artificial structures under constant pseudomagnetic fields. Our findings may also offer opportunities to manipulate sound in conceptually novel ways.

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Fig. 1: Synthesized acoustic magnetic field and relativistic Landau quantization.
Fig. 2: Experimental detection of the acoustic Landau quantization.
Fig. 3: Acoustic quantum-Hall-like edge states generated by the effective magnetic field.

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The data that support the plots within this paper and other findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.

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Acknowledgements

This work is supported by the National Basic Research Program of China (grant number 2015CB755500); the National Natural Science Foundation of China (grant numbers 11774275, 11674250, 11534013, 11747310 and 11890701); the National Key R&D Program of China (grant number 2018FYA0305800); the Natural Science Foundation of Hubei Province (grant number 2017CFA042). F.Z. was supported by University of Texas at Dallas research enhancement funds and the Army Research Office under grant number W911NF-18-1-0416.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Key Laboratory of Artificial Micro- and Nano-structures of Ministry of Education and School of Physics and Technology, Wuhan University, Wuhan, China

    Xinhua Wen, Chunyin Qiu, Yajuan Qi, Liping Ye, Manzhu Ke & Zhengyou Liu

  2. Department of Physics, University of Texas at Dallas, Richardson, TX, USA

    Fan Zhang

  3. Institute for Advanced Studies, Wuhan University, Wuhan, China

    Zhengyou Liu

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  1. Xinhua Wen
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  6. Fan Zhang
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Contributions

C.Q. conceived the idea and supervised the project. X.W. performed the simulations. X.W., Y.Q. and L.Y. did the experiments. C.Q., X.W., F.Z. and Z.L. analysed the data and wrote the manuscript. All authors contributed to scientific discussion of the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Chunyin Qiu.

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Wen, X., Qiu, C., Qi, Y. et al. Acoustic Landau quantization and quantum-Hall-like edge states. Nat. Phys. 15, 352–356 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41567-019-0446-3

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