Observation of topological valley modes in an elastic hexagonal lattice

We report on the experimental observation of topologically protected edge waves in a two-dimensional elastic hexagonal lattice. The lattice is designed to feature K-point Dirac cones that are well separated from the other numerous elastic wave modes characterizing this continuous structure. We exploit the arrangement of localized masses at the nodes to break mirror symmetry at the unit-cell level, which opens a frequency band gap. This produces a nontrivial band structure that supports topologically protected edge states along the interface between two realizations of the lattice obtained through mirror symmetry. Detailed numerical models support the investigations of the occurrence of the edge states, while their existence is verified through full-field experimental measurements. The test results show the confinement of the topologically protected edge states along predefined interfaces and illustrate the lack of significant backscattering at sharp corners. Experiments conducted on a trivial waveguide in an otherwise uniformly periodic lattice reveal the inability of a perturbation to propagate and its sensitivity to backscattering, which suggests the superior waveguiding performance of the class of nontrivial interfaces investigated herein.