Strategic manipulation of wave and particle transport in various media is the key driving force for modern information processing and communication. In a strongly scattering medium, waves and particles exhibit versatile transport characteristics such as localization1, tunnelling with exponential decay, ballistic, and diffusion behaviours due to dynamical multiple scattering from strong scatters or impurities. Recent investigations of graphene6 have offered a unique approach, from a quantum point of view, to design the dispersion of electrons on demand, enabling relativistic massless Dirac quasiparticles, and thus inducing low-loss transport either ballistically or diffusively. Here, we report an experimental demonstration of an artificial phononic graphene tailored for surface phonons on a LiNbO₃ integrated platform. The system exhibits Dirac quasiparticle-like transport, that is, pseudo-diffusion at the Dirac point, which gives rise to a thickness-independent temporal beating for transmitted pulses, an analogue of Zitterbewegung effects. The demonstrated fully integrated artificial phononic graphene platform here constitutes a step towards on-chip quantum simulators of graphene and unique monolithic electro-acoustic integrated circuits.

Nature Materials (2016), doi:10.1038/nmat4743
Received 08 September 2015 Accepted 25 July 2016 Published online 05 September 2016

http://www.nature.com/nmat/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nmat4743.html