Revealing Topology in Metals using Experimental Protocols Inspired by $K$-Theory

TL;DR

This paper introduces an experimental protocol inspired by $K$-theory to reveal topological properties in gapless metals, demonstrated through acoustic crystals, enabling direct observation of topological invariants and boundary states.

Contribution

It presents a novel experimental method to identify topological phenomena in gapless metals using $K$-theory inspired operators and physical implementations.

Findings

Observation of robust boundary-localized states in acoustic metals

Implementation of a new Hamiltonian revealing spectral flow

Measurement of topological invariants in gapless systems

Abstract

Topological metals are special conducting materials with gapless band structures and nontrivial edge-localized resonances, whose discovery has proved elusive because the traditional topological classification methods do not apply in this context. Inspired by recent theoretical developments that leveraged techniques from the field of $C^*$-algebras to identify topological metals \cite{cerjan_local_2021}, here, we directly observe topological phenomena in gapless acoustic crystals and provide a general experimental technique to demonstrate their topology. Specifically, we not only observe robust boundary-localized states in a topological acoustic metal, but also re-interpret a composite operator, mathematically derived from the K-theory of the problem, as a new Hamiltonian, whose physical implementation allows us to directly observe a topological spectral flow and measure the topological invariants. Our observations and experimental protocols may offer insights for discovering topological behavior across a wide array of artificial and natural materials that lack bulk band gaps.