Recent advances in the field of metamaterials have shown that waves can be efficiently manipulated at the subwavelength scale through the interactions with an ensemble of resonant inclusions, opening new horizons in overcoming the size limits of devices which are often tied to the wavelength of operation [1]. Such size limit is crucial for many applications where the overall dimensions are required to be as small as possible, for instance cost-efficient devices for satellite communications. Unfortunately, the resonant inclusions of these artificial media result in a large sensitivity of the propagation to geometrical imperfections and disorder-induced backscattering, reducing their performance. More recently, it has been demonstrated that the topological concepts which originated in solid-state physics can be transferred to not only to photonic crystals [3,4], which still scale with the operating wavelength, but also to locally-resonant crystalline metamaterials, which can have a deeply subwavelength structure [5]. However, since the topological properties in such time-reversal invariant designs heavily rely on the lattice structure of the media and frequency dispersion of the metamaterial, they are inevitably sensitive to any disruption of the lattice symmetries that can couple time-reversed modes. Moreover, since most of disorders (in the location or in resonance frequency of the resonant inclusions) will most likely break the lattice symmetry and disrupt the wave propagation, these time-reversal invariant topological designs are also in principle sensitive to defects. In this talk, we will show that a chiral metamaterial [6,7] can be exploited to create a robust-to-disorder subwavelength waveguide and we will demonstrate this possibility experimentally in the microwave regime. Moreover, we will quantitatively demonstrate the superior robustness of the proposed design to both spatial or frequency disorders by performing ensemble averages on disorder realizations along the path of the guided wave, and comparing them with previously proposed subwavelength waveguide designs: frequency defect lines, symmetry-based topological edge modes and valley interface states. [1] J. D. Joannopoulos, S. G. Johnson, J. N. Winn, and R. D. Meade, Photonic Crystals: Molding the Flow of Light (Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2008), 2nd ed. [2] N. Kaina, F. Lemoult, M. Fink, and G. Lerosey, Negative Refractive Index and Acoustic Superlens from Multiple Scattering in Single Negative Metamaterials, Nature, 525, 77 (2015). [3] S. Raghu and F. D. M. Haldane, Analogs of Quantum-Hall-Effect Edge States in Photonic Crystals, Phys. Rev. A - At. Mol. Opt. Phys., 78, 1 (2008). [4] Z. Wang, Y. Chong, J. D. Joannopoulos, and M. Soljacić, Observation of Unidirectional Backscattering-Immune Topological Electromagnetic States., Nature, 461, 772 (2009). [5] S. Yves, R. Fleury, T. Berthelot, M. Fink, F. Lemoult, and G. Lerosey, Crystalline Metamaterials for Topological Properties at Subwavelength Scales, Nat. Commun., 8, 16023 (2017). [6] M. Goryachev and M. E. Tobar, Reconfigurable Microwave Photonic Topological Insulator, Phys. Rev. Appl., 6, 1 (2016). [7] J. E. Vázquez-Lozano and A. Martínez, Optical Chirality in Dispersive and Lossy Media, Phys. Rev. Lett., 121, 43901 (2018).
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