Realization of quasicrystalline quadrupole topological insulators in electrical circuits

Quadrupole topological insulators are a new class of topological insulators with quantized quadrupole moments, which support protected gapless corner states. The experimental demonstrations of quadrupole-topological insulators were reported in a series of artificial materials, such as photonic crystals, acoustic crystals, and electrical circuits. In all these cases, the underlying structures have discrete translational symmetry and thus are periodic. Here we experimentally realize two-dimensional aperiodic-quasicrystalline quadrupole-topological insulators by constructing them in electrical circuits, and observe the spectrally and spatially localized corner modes. In measurement, the modes appear as topological boundary resonances in the corner impedance spectra. Additionally, we demonstrate the robustness of corner modes on the circuit. Our circuit design may be extended to study topological phases in higher-dimensional aperiodic structures. Higher order topological systems add an additional layer of complexity to the bulk boundary correspondence by being able to sustain additional modes such as corner and hinge states. Here, the authors use electrical circuits to realize a two-dimensional quasicrystalline quadrupole topological insulator without discrete translational symmetry and observe localized corner modes.