Tacticity in Chiral Phononic Crystals

The study of vibrational properties in engineered periodic structures relies on the early intuitions of Haüy and Boscovich, who regarded crystals as ensembles of periodically arranged point masses interacting via attractive and repulsive forces. Contrary to electromagnetism, where mechanical properties do not couple to the wave propagation mechanism, in elasticity this paradigm inevitably leads to low stiffness and high-density materials. Recent works transcend the Haüy-Boscovich perception, proposing shaped atoms with finite size, which relaxes the link between their mass and inertia, to achieve unusual dynamic behavior at lower frequencies, leaving the stiffness unaltered. Here, we introduce the concept of tacticity in spin-spin-coupled chiral phononic crystals. This additional layer of architecture has a remarkable effect on their dispersive behavior and allows to successfully realize material variants with equal mass density and stiffness but radically different dynamic properties.