The extensive research of two-dimensional layered materials has revealed that valleys, as energy extrema in momentum space, could offer a new degree of freedom for carrying information. Based on this concept, researchers have predicted valley-Hall topological insulators that could support valley-polarized edge states at non-trivial domain walls. Recently, several kinds of photonic and sonic crystals have been proposed as classical counterparts of valley-Hall topological insulators. However, direct experimental observation of valley-polarized edge states in photonic crystals has remained difficult until now. Here, we demonstrate a designer surface plasmon crystal comprising metallic patterns deposited on a dielectric substrate, which can become a valley-Hall photonic topological insulator by exploiting the mirror-symmetry-breaking mechanism. Topological edge states with valley-dependent transport are directly visualized in the microwave regime. The observed edge states are confirmed to be fully valley-polarized through spatial Fourier transforms. Topological protection of the edge states at sharp corners is also experimentally demonstrated.

We demonstrate a ventilated metamaterial absorber operating at low frequency (< 500 Hz).With only two layers of the absorption units, high-efficiency absorption (> 90%) has been achieved in both simulations and experiments. This high-efficiency absorption under ventilation condition is originated from the weak coupling of the two identical split tube resonators constituting the absorber, which leads to the hybridization of the degenerate eigenmodes and breaks the absorption upper limit of 50% for conventional transmissive symmetric acoustic absorbers. The absorber can also be extended to an array and work in free space. The absorber should have potential applications in acoustic engineering where both noise reduction and ventilation are required. 1 15 Pengjiang Wei, Charles Croënne, Sai Tak Chu, and Jensen Li, Symmetrical and anti-symmetrical coherent perfect absorption for acoustic waves, Applied Physics Letters Rainbow-trapping absorbers: Broadband, perfect and asymmetric sound absorption by subwavelength panels for transmission problems, Scientific Reports 7 (1), 13595 (2017). 21 Houyou Long, Ying Cheng, and Xiaojun Liu, Asymmetric absorber with multiband and broadband for low-frequency sound, Jing, Tunable asymmetric transmission via lossy acoustic metasurfaces, Physical Review Letters 119 (3), 035501 (2017).

We demonstrate a bi-layer ultrathin anisotropic metasurface which could near-completely convert the circular-polarized electromagnetic wave to its cross polarization. The bi-layer metasurface is composed of periodic 180°-twisted double-cut split ring resonators on both sides of an F4B substrate. At resonance, cross-polarized transmission larger than 94% is observed both in simulations and experiments. The resonant frequency of the metasurface could be effectively tuned by adjusting the geometric parameters of the metasurface, while relatively high conversion efficiency is preserved. The high efficiency and ease of fabrication suggest that the ultrathin metasurface could have potential applications in telecommunications.