Phononic topological insulators with tunable pseudospin physics

Efficient control of phonons is crucial to energy-information technology, but limited by the lacking of tunable degrees of freedom like charge or spin. Here we suggest to utilize crystalline symmetry-protected pseudospins as new quantum degrees of freedom to manipulate phonons. Remarkably, we reveal a duality between phonon pseudospins and electron spins by presenting Kramers-like degeneracy and pseudospin counterparts of spin-orbit coupling, which lays the foundation for "pseudospin phononics". Furthermore, we report two types of three-dimensional phononic topological insulators, which give topologically protected, gapless surface states with linear and quadratic band degeneracies, respectively. These topological surface states display unconventional phonon transport behaviors attributed to the unique pseudospin-momentum locking, which are useful for phononic circuits, transistors, antennas, etc. The emerging pseudospin physics offers new opportunities to develop future phononics

One-Bit Compressed Sensing by Greedy Algorithms

Sign truncated matching pursuit (STrMP) algorithm is presented in this paper. STrMP is a new greedy algorithm for the recovery of sparse signals from the sign measurement, which combines the principle of consistent reconstruction with orthogonal matching pursuit (OMP). The main part of STrMP is as concise as OMP and hence STrMP is simple to implement. In contrast to previous greedy algorithms for one-bit compressed sensing, STrMP only need to solve a convex and unconstraint subproblem at each iteration. Numerical experiments show that STrMP is fast and accurate for one-bit compressed sensing compared with other algorithms.Comment: 16 pages, 7 figure

Weak Topological Insulators in PbTe/SnTe Superlattices

It is desirable to realize topological phases in artificial structures by engineering electronic band structures. In this paper, we investigate $(PbTe)_m(SnTe)_{2n-m}$ superlattices along [001] direction and find a robust weak topological insulator phase for a large variety of layer numbers m and 2n-m. We confirm this topologically non-trivial phase by calculating Z2 topological invariants and topological surface states based on the first-principles calculations. We show that the folding of Brillouin zone due to the superlattice structure plays an essential role in inducing topologically non-trivial phases in this system. This mechanism can be generalized to other systems in which band inversion occurs at multiple momenta, and gives us a brand-new way to engineer topological materials in artificial structures.Comment: 6 pages, 4 figures, another author adde