EFRI NewLAW: New frontiers for topologically-protected propagation of light, sound, elastic and mechanical waves

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This award supports an ambitious four-year team-effort with the objective of conceiving, exploring, designing and realizing a new class of devices based on nanophotonic, radio-wave, acoustic, elastic, mechanical interactions and their combinations. The devices will exploit robust, broadband, topologically-protected transport properties related to the propagation of optical, acoustic and mechanical waves. These efforts will aim at establishing a new paradigm for signal transport and will open unprecedented opportunities for technology by offering disruptive advances in reconfigurability, isolation, robustness and non-reciprocal transmission properties that will benefit several national grand challenges for our society. These include enhanced data-rate and spectrum efficiency for the telecom industry, enhanced acoustic imaging for the healthcare industry, sensing concepts for civil resource management and the defense industry. Other areas that may benefit from the progress enabled by this program include sound proofing, radiation hardening, improved nano-assembly, identification and tagging for the manufacturing sector, and improvements in fabrication tolerance and computational efficiency for the photonic industry. At the same time, this program will engage domestic companies with direct interest in its technological progress and the next generation of scientists in a highly interdisciplinary research program, with emphasis on underrepresented diversity and minorities.In condensed-matter physics, topological insulators enable robust one-way electron conduction at their edges, and at the same time insulation in the bulk. These unusual properties, stemming from the non-trivial topology of their electronic band structure, have recently inspired analogues for photons and phonons in electromagnetic, acoustic, elastic and mechanical systems. So far these efforts have been focused on physics-based explorations, with limited impact on device engineering and applications. This project will focus on engineering-oriented investigations that: will significantly advance the theory, analysis, design, modeling and control of topologically-protected wave propagation achieved by synthetic gauge fields (enabled by spatio-temporal modulation and/or nonlinear wave-matter interactions) and pseudo-spins (enabled by internal and spatial symmetries of fields and structures); will develop accurate analysis, modeling and optimal designs of compact topological devices for several applications, including isolators and circulators, multiplexers, non-reciprocal emitters and topological assembly, applicable to electromagnetic, acoustic, elastic waves and their hybrids; will experimentally verify, realize and characterize these devices not only to demonstrate topological protection, but also to show improved performance and their impact in practical application systems; and will introduce and explore new mechanisms for topological protection, such as topological order induced by nonlinearities and by multi-physics wave-matter interactions, significantly advancing the frontiers of topological science, from basic theory to advanced fabrication and characterization.