Topological pumping in a magneto-mechanical system

A topological charge pump conveys quanta of charge across a gapped system while being robust against array disorder, external noise, and disorder in the pumping protocol. The implementation of topological insulators in both optical and acoustic coupled resonator systems has opened exciting paths towards new control over light and sound, however an equivalent temporal topological pump has yet to be demonstrated. In this work, we demonstrate that a 1D classical system that is adiabatically spatio-temporally modulated can produce an equivalent topological pump for bosons. Our experimental demonstration consists of an array of magneto-mechanical resonators, where the inter-resonator coupling rates are controlled by the distance over which the magnetic interaction takes place. We modulate both the coupling rates and the on-site potentials using a mechanical apparatus, and demonstrate that mechanical energy can be pumped from one edge mode of the array to the other edge mode while the system remains gapped. We show that this 1D array is the equivalent of a Chern insulator in one real dimension and one synthetic dimension.