title: Pseudomagnetic fields for sound at the nanoscale.
abstract: There is a growing effort in creating chiral transport of sound waves. However, most approaches so far have been confined to the macroscopic scale. Here, we propose an approach suitable to the nanoscale that is based on pseudomagnetic fields. These pseudomagnetic fields for sound waves are the analogue of what electrons experience in strained graphene. In our proposal, they are created by simple geometrical modifications of an existing and experimentally proven phononic crystal design, the snowflake crystal. This platform is robust, scalable, and well-suited for a variety of excitation and readout mechanisms, among them optomechanical approaches.
authors.affiliation: Institute for Theoretical Physics, University of Erlangen-Nürnberg, 91058 Erlangen, Germany; christian.brendel@mpl.mpg.de.|Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light, 91058 Erlangen, Germany.
authors.forename: Christian
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Brendel
authors.affiliation: Institute for Theoretical Physics, University of Erlangen-Nürnberg, 91058 Erlangen, Germany.|Department of Physics, University of Malta, Msida MSD 2080, Malta.
authors.forename: Vittorio
authors.initials: V
authors.lastname: Peano
authors.affiliation: Kavli Nanoscience Institute, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA 91125.|Institute for Quantum Information and Matter, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA 91125.|Thomas J. Watson, Sr. Laboratories of Applied Physics, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA 91125.
authors.forename: Oskar J
authors.initials: OJ
authors.lastname: Painter
authors.affiliation: Institute for Theoretical Physics, University of Erlangen-Nürnberg, 91058 Erlangen, Germany.|Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light, 91058 Erlangen, Germany.
authors.forename: Florian
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Marquardt
keywords: nanomechanics; optomechanics; phononic crystal; pseudomagnetic field; topological physics