Experimental observation of super-Klein tunneling in phononic crystals

Abstract

We numerically and experimentally report the acoustic analogue of the super-Klein tunneling in a heterojunction of phononic crystals formed with Willis scatterers that exhibit pseudospin-1 Dirac cones. By comparing with the pseudospin-1/2 Dirac cones, pseudospin-1 ones require in the band structure an additional flatband across the Dirac points. The conventional Klein tunneling, which is predicted in pseudospin-1/2 systems like graphene, consists of perfect transmission only under normal incidence through a potential barrier of any width. However, the super-Klein tunneling that we evidence here is defined for pseudospin-1 systems as a perfect transmission for all incidence angles at one single frequency within the energy barrier. This direct observation may have important implications in the exploration of the rich physics of pseudospin-1 quasiparticles.