Artificial gauge field modulated on-chip gigahertz acoustic coupling
Jiazhou Chen, Haifei Zhu, Yong Mei, Wenyi Liu, Jinlin Chen, Junfeng Zhou, Lei Shao, Hualin Li, Shiyi Jiang, Houyou Long, Qiaozhen Zhang, Wenming Zhang, Ying Cheng, Jinyi Ma, Xiaojun LiuPhononic integrated circuits (PhICs) represent a promising paradigm for on-chip acoustic information processing. However, conventional straight-waveguide architectures suffer from intrinsically dispersive inter-waveguide coupling, limiting bandwidth and fabrication tolerance. Meanwhile, evanescent crosstalk between adjacent waveguides fundamentally constrains integration density. Here, we introduce an artificial gauge field (AGF) to suppress inter-waveguide coupling dispersion on a CMOS-compatible GaN-on-4H-SiC platform, as validated by the theoretical and experimental demonstration of a broadband 1:1 power divider (PD). Beyond outperforming conventional straight-waveguide directional couplers in broadband performance, the AGF-modulated PD exhibits enhanced robustness against both global offsets and local waveguide-gap perturbations. We further demonstrate the first realization of acoustic coherent destruction of tunneling, enabling crosstalk-free parallel waveguide arrays for densely integrated phononic architectures. Our work thus marks a significant advance toward scalable, high-density, and fabrication-tolerant PhICs.