The effects of dissipation on topological mechanical systems

TL;DR

This paper investigates how isotropic dissipation affects topological mechanical systems, showing that chiral edge states remain robust and that dissipation introduces damping dispersion and modifies wave packet dynamics.

Contribution

It provides a theoretical analysis of dissipation effects in a topological mechanical analogue of Chern insulators, highlighting robustness of edge states and new wave dynamics.

Findings

Chiral edge states are robust against strong dissipation.

Dissipation causes dispersion of damping in eigenstates.

Wave packet trajectories are curved due to Berry curvature effects.

Abstract

We theoretically study the effects of isotropic dissipation in a topological mechanical system which is an analogue of Chern insulator in mechanical vibrational lattice. The global gauge invariance is still conserved in this system albeit it is destroyed by the dissipation in the quantum counterpart. The chiral edge states in this system are therefore robust against strong dissipation. The dissipation also causes a dispersion of damping for the eigenstates. It will modify the equation of motion of a wave packet by an extra effective force. After taking into account the Berry curvature in the wave vector space, the trace of a free wave packet in the real space should be curved, feinting to break the Newton's first law.