The extensive research of two-dimensional layered materials has revealed that valleys, as energy extrema in momentum space, could offer a new degree of freedom for carrying information. Based on this concept, researchers have predicted valley-Hall topological insulators that could support valley-polarized edge states at non-trivial domain walls. Recently, several kinds of photonic and sonic crystals have been proposed as classical counterparts of valley-Hall topological insulators. However, direct experimental observation of valley-polarized edge states in photonic crystals has remained difficult until now. Here, we demonstrate a designer surface plasmon crystal comprising metallic patterns deposited on a dielectric substrate, which can become a valley-Hall photonic topological insulator by exploiting the mirror-symmetry-breaking mechanism. Topological edge states with valley-dependent transport are directly visualized in the microwave regime. The observed edge states are confirmed to be fully valley-polarized through spatial Fourier transforms. Topological protection of the edge states at sharp corners is also experimentally demonstrated.

We demonstrate a ventilated metamaterial absorber operating at low frequency (90%) has been achieved in both simulations and experiments. This high-efficiency absorption under the ventilation condition originates from the weak coupling of two identical split tube resonators constituting the absorber, which leads to the hybridization of the degenerate eigenmodes and breaks the absorption upper limit of 50% for conventional transmissive symmetric acoustic absorbers. The absorber can also be extended to an array and work in free space. The absorber should have potential applications in acoustic engineering where both noise reduction and ventilation are required.

We demonstrate a high-efficiency tunable acoustic absorber for low frequencies (<500 Hz) with subwavelength thickness. The acoustic absorber is based on split tube resonators and could reach high-efficiency absorption at tunable resonance frequency with wavelength in air at least 30 times larger than its total thickness in simulations and experiments. The resonance frequency and high-efficiency absorption of the absorber are robust under oblique incidence even at large angles. The absorber could have potential applications for acoustic engineering due to its high structural stability, ease of fabrication, subwavelength thickness, and robust high-efficiency.

If a full bandgap closes and then reopens when we continuously deform a periodic system while keeping its symmetry, a topological phase transition usually occurs. A common model demonstrating such a topological phase transition in condensed matter physics is the Su-Schrieffer-Heeger (SSH) model. As is well known, two distinct topological phases emerge when the intracell hopping is tuned from smaller to larger with respect to the intercell hopping in the model. The former case is topologically trivial, while the latter case is topologically non-trivial. Here, we design a 1D periodic acoustic system in exact analogy with the SSH model. The unit cell of the acoustic system is composed of two resonators and two junction tubes connecting them. We show that the topological phase transition happens in our acoustic analog when we tune the radii of the junction tubes which control the intercell and intracell hoppings. The topological phase transition is characterized by the abrupt change in the geometric Zak phase. The topological interface states between non-trivial and trivial phases of our acoustic analog are experimentally measured, and the results agree very well with the numerical values. Furthermore, we show that topologically non-trivial phases of our acoustic analog of the SSH model can support edge states, on which the discussion is absent in previous works about topological acoustics. The edge states are robust against localized defects and perturbations.

We demonstrate a bi-layer ultrathin anisotropic metasurface which could near-completely convert the circular-polarized electromagnetic wave to its cross polarization. The bi-layer metasurface is composed of periodic 180°-twisted double-cut split ring resonators on both sides of an F4B substrate. At resonance, cross-polarized transmission larger than 94% is observed both in simulations and experiments. The resonant frequency of the metasurface could be effectively tuned by adjusting the geometric parameters of the metasurface, while relatively high conversion efficiency is preserved. The high efficiency and ease of fabrication suggest that the ultrathin metasurface could have potential applications in telecommunications.

We report a metasurface for focusing reflected ultrasonic waves over a wide frequency band of 0.45–0.55 MHz. The broadband focusing effect of the reflective metasurface is studied numerically and then confirmed experimentally using near-field scanning techniques. The focusing mechanism can be attributed to the hyperboloidal reflection phase profile imposed by different depths of concentric grooves on the metasurface. In particular, the focal lengths of the reflective metasurface are extracted from simulations and experiments, and both exhibit good linear dependence on frequency over the considered frequency band. The proposed broadband reflective metasurface with tunable focal length has potential applications in the broad field of ultrasonics, such as ultrasonic tomographic imaging, high intensity focused ultrasound treatment, etc.