The manipulation of acoustic wave propagation in fluids has numerous applications, including some in everyday life. Acoustic technologies frequently develop in tandem with optics, using shared concepts such as waveguiding and metamedia. It is thus noteworthy that an entirely novel class of electromagnetic waves, known as "topological edge states," has recently been demonstrated. These are inspired by the electronic edge states occurring in topological insulators, and possess a striking and technologically promising property: the ability to travel in a single direction along a surface without backscattering, regardless of the existence of defects or disorder. Here, we develop an analogous theory of topological fluid acoustics, and propose a scheme for realizing topological edge states in an acoustic structure containing circulating fluids. The phenomenon of disorder-free one-way sound propagation, which does not occur in ordinary acoustic devices, may have novel applications for acoustic isolators, modulators, and transducers.

Recently discovered1,2 valley photonic crystals (VPCs) mimic many of the unusual properties of two-dimensional (2D) gapped valleytronic materials [3][4][5][6][7][8][9] . Of the utmost interest to optical communications is their ability to support topologically protected chiral edge (kink) states [3][4][5][6][7][8][9] at the internal domain wall between two VPCs with opposite valley-Chern indices. Here we experimentally demonstrate valley-polarized kink states with polarization multiplexing in VPCs, designed from a spin-compatible four-band model. When the valley pseudospin is conserved, we show that the kink states exhibit nearly perfect out-coupling e ciency into directional beams, through the intersection between the internal domain wall and the external edge separating the VPCs from ambient space. The out-coupling behaviour remains topologically protected even when we break the spin-like polarization degree of freedom (DOF), by introducing an e ective spin-orbit coupling in one of the VPC domains. This also constitutes the first realization of spin-valley locking for topological valley transport.

Topological photonic states, inspired by robust chiral edge states in topological insulators, have recently been demonstrated in a few photonic systems, including an array of coupled on-chip ring resonators at communication wavelengths. However, the intrinsic difference between electrons and photons determines that the ‘topological protection' in time-reversal-invariant photonic systems does not share the same robustness as its counterpart in electronic topological insulators. Here in a designer surface plasmon platform consisting of tunable metallic sub-wavelength structures, we construct photonic topological edge states and probe their robustness against a variety of defect classes, including some common time-reversal-invariant photonic defects that can break the topological protection, but do not exist in electronic topological insulators. This is also an experimental realization of anomalous Floquet topological edge states, whose topological phase cannot be predicted by the usual Chern number topological invariants.

A fundamental building block for nanophotonics is the ability to achieve negative refraction of polaritons, because this could enable the demonstration of many unique nanoscale applications such as deep-subwavelength imaging, superlens, and novel guiding. However, to achieve negative refraction of highly squeezed polaritons, such as plasmon polaritons in graphene and phonon polaritons in boron nitride (BN) with their wavelengths squeezed by a factor over 100, requires the ability to flip the sign of their group velocity at will, which is challenging. Here we reveal that the strong coupling between plasmon and phonon polaritons in graphene-BN heterostructures can be used to flip the sign of the group velocity of the resulting hybrid (plasmon-phonon-polariton) modes. We predict allangle negative refraction between plasmon and phonon polaritons and, even more surprisingly, between hybrid graphene plasmons and between hybrid phonon polaritons. Graphene-BN heterostructures thus provide a versatile platform for the design of nanometasurfaces and nanoimaging elements.negative refraction | plasmon polariton | phonon polariton | graphene-boron nitride heterostructure P olaritons with high spatial confinement, such as plasmon polaritons in graphene (1-5) and phonon polaritons in a thin hexagonal boron nitride (BN) slab (6-15), enable control over the propagation of light at the extreme nanoscale, due to their in-plane polaritonic wavelength that can be squeezed by a factor over 100. Henceforth we use the term squeezing factor (or confinement factor) to define the ratio between the wavelength in free space and the in-plane polaritonic wavelength. The combination of tunability, low losses, and ultraconfinement (1,2,8,10,11,15) makes them superior alternatives to conventional metal plasmons and highly appealing for nanophotonic applications (3-5, 10-13, 15). Their extreme spatial confinement, however, also limits our ability to tailor their dispersion relations.Unlike the case of 2D plasmons, the coupling between metal plasmons in a metal-dielectric-metal structure dramatically changes their dispersion relation and can even flip the sign of their group velocities (16,17). This has led to exciting applications by tailoring the in-plane plasmonic refraction, giving flexibility in controlling the energy flow of light. Specifically, by flipping the sign of the group velocity of metal plasmons, plasmonic negative refraction has been predicted (16) and demonstrated (17). The negative refraction has also been extensively explored in metamaterials, metasurfaces, and photonic crystals (18-26), but they become experimentally very challenging to realize when dealing with polaritons with high squeezing factors. In contrast to metal plasmons, the group velocity of graphene plasmons (2,11,27) and all other 2D plasmons (28-32) is always positive, including that in graphene-based multilayer structures (33). This has made the in-plane negative refraction for highly squeezed 2D plasmon polaritons seem impossible to achieve.Contrary to 2D plas...