Supercell-enabled inverse design of boundary-state dispersion for group-velocity control in pseudomagnetic phononic crystals
Abstract
Topological boundary states offer a platform for guided-wave propagation within bulk bandgaps. Their propagation characteristics depend not only on the spectral extent of the states but also on their dispersion within the operating bandwidth. A nearly linear dispersion provides more uniform group velocity across frequency, whereas a reduced slope enables slow-wave propagation. Despite advances in inverse design of prescribed dispersion relations and topological dispersion tuning, application-oriented characteristics of boundary-state dispersion have rarely been direct inverse-design objectives. Here, we develop a supercell-enabled, surrogate-assisted framework for the inverse design of boundary-state dispersion in a phononic crystal with pseudomagnetic fields. Area-preserving anisotropic deformation shifts the local Dirac points, and independent variation of 21 rows within the supercell provides distributed control over the boundary-state branch. A constraint-preserving surrogate reconstructs the dispersion from an initial frequency and positive frequency increments, with first- and second-difference losses introduced to capture local slope and curvature. Coupled with a genetic algorithm, the framework targets two prescribed-bandwidth design tasks: highly linear dispersion and slow-wave dispersion. For the former, finite-element verification yields relative group-velocity variations of 0.142% to 1.183% over prescribed bandwidths of 4% to 6%. For slow-wave designs, mean group velocities of 190 to 385 m/s are obtained over bandwidths of 0.2% to 0.8% while satisfying a 5% group-velocity variation limit. These results establish boundary-state dispersion as a direct inverse-design target beyond conventional bandwidth optimization, opening a flexible route to group-velocity control through application-oriented dispersion engineering over prescribed relative bandwidths.
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BibTeX
@misc{chen2026supercellenabled,
title = {{Supercell-enabled inverse design of boundary-state dispersion for group-velocity control in pseudomagnetic phononic crystals}},
author = {Hua-Yang Chen and Nan-Xin Yu and Zhen-Hui Qin and Yan-Feng Chen and Si-Yuan Yu},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2610.18908},
eprint = {2610.18908},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.18908},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Supercell-enabled inverse design of boundary-state dispersion for group-velocity control in pseudomagnetic phononic crystals
AU - Hua-Yang Chen
AU - Nan-Xin Yu
AU - Zhen-Hui Qin
AU - Yan-Feng Chen
AU - Si-Yuan Yu
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/12
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2610.18908
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.18908
AB - Topological boundary states offer a platform for guided-wave propagation within bulk bandgaps. Their propagation characteristics depend not only on the spectral extent of the states but also on their dispersion within the operating bandwidth. A nearly linear dispersion provides more uniform group velocity across frequency, whereas a reduced slope enables slow-wave propagation. Despite advances in inverse design of prescribed dispersion relations and topological dispersion tuning, application-oriented characteristics of boundary-state dispersion have rarely been direct inverse-design objectives. Here, we develop a supercell-enabled, surrogate-assisted framework for the inverse design of boundary-state dispersion in a phononic crystal with pseudomagnetic fields. Area-preserving anisotropic deformation shifts the local Dirac points, and independent variation of 21 rows within the supercell provides distributed control over the boundary-state branch. A constraint-preserving surrogate reconstructs the dispersion from an initial frequency and positive frequency increments, with first- and second-difference losses introduced to capture local slope and curvature. Coupled with a genetic algorithm, the framework targets two prescribed-bandwidth design tasks: highly linear dispersion and slow-wave dispersion. For the former, finite-element verification yields relative group-velocity variations of 0.142% to 1.183% over prescribed bandwidths of 4% to 6%. For slow-wave designs, mean group velocities of 190 to 385 m/s are obtained over bandwidths of 0.2% to 0.8% while satisfying a 5% group-velocity variation limit. These results establish boundary-state dispersion as a direct inverse-design target beyond conventional bandwidth optimization, opening a flexible route to group-velocity control through application-oriented dispersion engineering over prescribed relative bandwidths.
ER -