Catalogue of topological phonon materials

Abstract

Phonons play a crucial role in many properties of solid state systems, such as thermal and electrical conductivity, neutron scattering and associated effects or superconductivity. Hence, it is expected that topological phonons will also lead to rich and unconventional physics and the search of materials hosting topological phonons becomes a priority in the field. In electronic crystalline materials, a large part of the topological properties of Bloch states can be indicated by their symmetry eigenvalues in reciprocal space. This has been adapted to the high-throughput calculations of topological materials, and more than half of the stoichiometric materials on the databases are found to be topological insulators or semi-metals. Based on the existing phonon materials databases, here we have performed the first catalogue of topological phonon bands for more than ten thousand three-dimensional crystalline materials. Using topological quantum chemistry, we calculate the band representations, compatibility relations, and band topologies of each isolated set of phonon bands for the materials in the phonon databases. We have also calculated the real space invariants for all the topologically trivial bands and classified them as atomic and obstructed atomic bands. In particular, surface phonon modes (dispersion) are calculated on different cleavage planes for all the materials. Remarkably, we select more than one thousand "ideal" non-trivial phonon materials to fascinate the future experimental studies. All the data-sets obtained in the the high-throughput calculations are used to build a Topological Phonon Database.