News



Feb 06 2023

We are proud of Dr. María Rosendo López who has recently been granted an Outstanding Thesis Award at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid for her European Research Council (ERC) funded research into symmetry and topology in combination with sound and vibrations! Among her papers, she published two Phys. Rev. Lett. articles on 2nd order topology and twisted flat bands. We wish her all the best in her future adventures! 🎉 🥂

Dec 15 2023

Jingyi “Kelly” standing shoulder to shoulder with the Terrones giants! Crazy topologies in the making!

Nov 23 2023

Bin Liang had the idea to test Airy-Talbot waves with sound waves. For this we used spoof surface acoustic waves that I have worked on during my PhD. The Talbot effect is a classical phenomenon in optics discovered in 1836 in which near-field diffraction of a periodic structure replicates itself at a designated position referred to as the Talbot distance. Another prominent diffraction phenomenon is the Airy beam which displays a parabolic intensity bending of its main lobe with exceptional resilience against perturbations. This effect that was named after Sir George Biddel Airy, who derived the Airy integral in connection with optical caustics, has demonstrated its significance through the ability to direct sound along curved paths. I hope you enjoy reading our paper.

Aug 07 2023

We are very happy to have our paper not only appearing in Phys. Rev. Lett., but also highlighted as an editor’s suggestion. Taken directly from the journal’s page: A novel acoustic Su-Schrieffer-Heeger chain with non-Hermitian components displays a non-Hermitian phase transition and reveals new acoustic topological interface states with tunable robust confinement.
Breaking!! We update that Phys. Rev. Lett. selected our contribution as the cover story [👌]

Jun 25 2023

The field of topological insulators is maturing, yet, four distinctive topics were identified, marking the focus of our review paper. Very happy that NATURE gave us this opportunity!

May 29 2023
They grow so fast!
Happy to see that Zhiwang and Penglin are doing well. They were a visiting PhD scholar and a postdoc and are now faculty members at their universities in Nanjing and Shanghai.

Dec 12 2022
I am very excited and grateful for this opportunity. IMDEA Materials made me a proud group leader of the acoustic and mechanical metamaterials team. Can’t wait to do BIG things here! Stay tuned!

Jul 22 2022

What great experience it has been to learn on acoustic orbital angular momentum engineering. Thanks to my friends Ying and Bin from NJU! Here is the paper about our acoustic motor, and here is the one on the thermoacoustic metasurface.

Jun 15 2022

The European Commission considers our efforts a success story! Many thanks for this! More importantly, many thanks to our PhDs and Postdocs!
Here is the story, link: ec.europa.eu.

Oct 02 2021
Topological gallery of non-Hermitian whispers

I always wanted to have something equivalent to an acoustic laser at hand. Lasing or gain medium for sound waves? Yes, this is exciting. Topics in optical metamaterials are entirely dedicated to that, like “loss-compensated metamaterials” or “active plasmonics”, let alone “laser physics”!! My old friend Ying had this fantastic idea of using thermoacoustics to generate sound in conductors when an AC current is properly applied. Yes, we would not generate quanta of sound, like photons, but it would be a neat way to incorporate this effect in lattices to explore topological lasers…sorry, I mean, topological sasers! “S” is for sound my friends! Ying suggested using carbon nanotube films as they have already shown in the past to be efficient sound generators. I don’t have to explain the effort (time and money) behind the construction that consisted in coating really many crystal rods by those CNT films. Each coated rod needed electrical leads, a connection to a circuit, and all arranged in a honeycomb lattice! A truly active acoustic graphene-like material! Now that you are here, you have probably heard of a band gap. With the right geometrical arrangement you can make it topological non-trivial, but in its active construction, the resulting edge states appear with enhanced amplitude. To my amazement, we were able to out-couple those guys into highly collimated, and topologically protected acoustic SASER beams! I hope you enjoy reading the paper!

Nature 597, 655 (2021).

Link to the paper: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-021-03833-4

Summary published in Science & Vie (monthly science magazine published in France).

Aug 17 2021

Here is the acoustic answer to a Faraday cage – excited to have this published in Phys. Rev. Lett. as an editors’ choice with Yun Lai and Nick Fang!

Apr 23 2021

We found the acoustic analogy of the Förster resonance energy transfer between donors and acceptors! After a hard fought battle (rejected in PRL and AFM) the paper will soon appear in Nat. Comm. Image taken from: DOI:10.3390/ijms131114929

Apr 19 2021

Today we published a News and Views in Nature Nanotechnology where we discuss how topological defects using a man-made vortex can trap either light or sound!

Nov 2 2020

Nature’s Communications Physics journal has been around not even two years, and it’s first review article, yes, our Topological sound contribution is the second highest cited paper of this journal! 💪