Macroscopic Floquet topological crystalline steel pump

TL;DR

This paper experimentally demonstrates topological transport of a steel sphere on a magnetic lattice driven by a moving external magnet, revealing how specific loop directions induce controlled, quantized transport in a Floquet topological crystalline system.

Contribution

It introduces an experimental realization of a Floquet topological crystalline pump using magnetic patterns and a steel sphere, highlighting the topological control of transport.

Findings

Transport is topologically quantized and depends on the loop direction.

Specific loop directions induce transport along primitive lattice vectors.

Experimental determination of loop conditions for nontrivial transport.

Abstract

The transport of a steel sphere on top of two dimensional periodic magnetic patterns is studied experimentally. Transport of the sphere is achieved by moving an external permanent magnet on a closed loop around the two dimensional crystal. The transport is topological i.e. the steel sphere is transported by a primitive unit vector of the lattice when the external magnet loop winds around specific directions. We experimentally determine the set of directions the loops must enclose for nontrivial transport of the steel sphere into various directions.