Observation of Multiple Topological Corner States in Thermal Diffusion

Abstract: Higher-dimensional topological meta-materials have more flexible than one-dimensional topological materials, which are more convenient to apply and solve practical problems. However, in diffusion systems, higher-dimensional topological states have not been well studied. In this work, we experimentally realized the 2D topological structure based on a kagome lattice of thermal metamaterial. Due to the anti-Hermitian properties of the diffusion Hamiltonian, it has purely imaginary eigenvalues corresponding to the decay rate. By theoretical analysis and directly observing the decay rate of temperature through experiments, we present the various corner states in 2D topological diffusive system. Our work constitutes the first realization of multiple corner states with high decay rates in a pure diffusion system, which provides a new idea for the design of topological protected thermal metamaterial in the future.