Paper detail

Observation of novel topological states in hyperbolic lattices

The discovery of novel topological states has served as a major branch in physics and material science. However, to date, most of the established topological states of matter have been employed in Euclidean systems, where the interplay between unique geometrical characteristics of curved spaces and exotic topological phases is less explored, especially on the experimental perspective. Recently, the experimental realization of the hyperbolic lattice, which is the regular tessellation in non-Euclidean spaces with a constant negative curvature, has attracted much attention in the field of simulating exotic phenomena from quantum physics in curved spaces to the general relativity. The question is whether there are novel topological states in such a non-Euclidean system without analogues in Euclidean spaces. Here, we demonstrate both in theory and experiment that novel topological states possessing unique properties compared with their Euclidean counterparts can exist in engineered hyperbolic lattices. Specially, based on the extended Haldane model, the boundary-dominated first-order Chern edge state with a nontrivial real-space Chern number is achieved, and the associated one-way propagation is proven. Furthermore, we show that fractal-like midgap higher-order zero modes appear in deformed hyperbolic lattices, where the number of zero modes increases exponentially with the increase of lattice size. These novel topological states are observed in designed hyperbolic circuit networks by measuring site-resolved impendence responses and dynamics of voltage packets. Our findings suggest a novel platform to study topological phases beyond Euclidean space and may have potential applications in the field of designing high-efficient topological devices, such as topological lasers, with extremely fewer trivial regions.