Symmetry of the phonon landscape across the duality boundary of twisted kagomes lattices

TL;DR

This paper explores the symmetry of phonon spectra in twisted kagome lattices across their duality boundary, revealing geometric and mechanistic factors influencing duality in phononic behavior.

Contribution

It introduces a detailed analysis of phonon spectrum symmetry in dual kagome configurations and extends the study to beam-based cellular metamaterials, highlighting the role of mechanisms beyond geometry.

Findings

Matching phonon spectra manifest in observable wavefield characteristics.

Symmetry of the phonon landscape is preserved in geometric kagome lattices.

Broken symmetry in beam lattices indicates a mechanistic influence on duality.

Abstract

In this work, we investigate the symmetry of the phonon landscape of twisted kagome lattices across their duality boundary. The study is inspired by recent work by Fruchart et al. [Nature, 577, 2020], who specialized the notion of duality to the mechanistic problem of kagome lattices and linked it to the existence of duality transformations between configurations that are symmetrically located across a critical transition point in configuration space. Our first goal is to elucidate how the existence of matching phonon spectra between dual configurations manifest in terms of observable wavefield characteristics. To this end, we explore the possibility to aggregate dual kagome configurations into bi-domain lattices that are geometrically heterogeneous but retain a mechanically homogeneous response. Our second objective is to extend the analysis to structural lattices of beams, which are representative of realistic cellular metamaterials. We show that, in this case, the symmetry of the phonon landscape across the duality boundary is broken, implying that the conditions for dual behavior do not merely depend on the geometry, but also on the dominant mechanisms of the cell, suggesting a dichotomy between geometric and functional duality.