A revolution in the science of sound is underway
For 150 years, sound science created indispensable technologies for society: loudspeakers, microphones, radio frequency (RF) devices in smartphones, sonar, and medical ultrasound imaging, among many. Today, the emerging field of topological acoustics (TA) is revolutionizing sound science and advancing frontiers. For example, TA now reveals that sound waves can support quantum-like degrees of freedom (e.g., geometric phase or spin) that were previously “hidden”.
TA also uncovers the possibility of coherence when parts of a wave or different waves correlate and “know” intimately about each other—analogous to a quantum mechanics phenomenon. Further, TA bestows the unprecedented attribute of robustness to disorder and imperfections, so that sound waves can propagate in environments with obstacles but without reflections or echoes. In addition, TA waves can encode greater information and data than conventional sound waves to augment perception in an environment. Also, with TA, sound-encoded data can multiplex for massively parallel information processing.
The three major research objectives of the Center are:
(a) to broaden our understanding of acoustics by revealing all the hidden aspects of TA.
(b) to exploit the attributes of TA to make new or better technologies in traditional and untraditional applications of acoustics.
(c) Invest in promising new TA research directions, where seed-level support sprouts new ideas in underexplored TA application areas.
To achieve these objectives, NewFoS articulates its research plan around three pillars. NewFoS will discover yet-unknown aspects of TA with the potential to revolutionize science and technology. NewFoS will use currently untapped attributes of TA waves to tackle two types of integration:
(a) problem-driven research projects that rely on TA to achieve unique solutions to today’s grand challenges in information science, telecommunication, sensing; and
(b) possibility-driven research “seed” approaches that envision the future with TA as a foundational “engine”.