Experimental Demonstration of Dynamic Topological Pumping Across Incommensurate Bilayered Acoustic Metamaterials

Abstract

A Thouless pump can be regarded as a dynamical version of the integer quantum Hall effect. In a finite-size configuration, such topological pump displays edge modes that emerge dynamically from one bulk-band and dive into the opposite bulk-band, an effect that can be reproduced with both quantum and classical systems. Here, we report the first un-assisted dynamic energy transfer across a metamaterial, via pumping of such topological edge modes. The system is a topological aperiodic acoustic crystal, with a phason that can be fast and periodically driven in adiabatic cycles. When one edge of the metamaterial is excited in a topological forbidden range of frequencies, a microphone placed at the other edge starts to pick up a signal as soon as the pumping process is set in motion. In contrast, the microphone picks no signal when the forbidden range of frequencies is non-topological.