Probing of the topological phase transition in a disordered 1D acoustic system

Abstract

The methods to determine the Zak phase introduced by previous studies are usually limited to the periodic systems protected by the inversion symmetry. In this work, we build a one-dimensional chiral symmetric acoustic chain with controllable disorder to break its inversion symmetry. By the mean chiral displacement method, we detect the Zak phase in order to observe the topological phase transition induced purely by disorder. The finding exhibits the topological Anderson insulator phase, in which an otherwise trivial acoustic Su–Schrieffer–Heeger model is driven non-trivial by disorder accompanied by the change of the topological sign. This method could also be utilized in chiral symmetry broken and non-Hermitian systems. The result reveals that disorder introduced in the acoustic devices may induce the change of the topological phase, which is promising for the design of new acoustic devices.