Observation of acoustic valley vortex states and valley-chirality locked beam splitting

As one of the most common waves in daily life, scalar sound is not easy to control by external fields since it lacks the intrinsic degrees of freedom such as the charge and spin in electrons. Here, the authors present an experimental observation of acoustic vortex states in sonic crystals, where the vortex chirality forms a good carrier of information for sound. By selectively exciting such novel states, they have fabricated a lattice array of sound vortices, and controlled the vortex chirality according to the operating frequency or incident direction of external sound. Furthermore, a peculiar beam-splitting behavior is observed, where the two spatially separated sound beams carry opposite vortex chirality, as manifested in the image here.