Double dirac cones at k = 0 in pinned platonic crystals

Abstract

In this paper, we compute the band structure for a pinned elastic plate which is constrained at the points of a hexagonal lattice. Existing work on platonic crystals has been restricted to square and rectangular array geometries, and an examination of other Bravais lattice geometries for platonic crystals has yet to be made. Such hexagonal arrays have been shown to support Dirac cone dispersion at the center of the Brillouin zone for phononic crystals, and we demonstrate the existence of double Dirac cones for the first time in platonic crystals here. In the vicinity of these Dirac points, there are several complex dispersion phenomena, including a multiple interference phenomenon between families of waves which correspond to free space transport and those which interact with the pins. An examination of the reflectance and transmittance for large finite gratings arranged in a hexagonal fashion is also made, where these effects can be visualized using plane waves. This is achieved via a recurrence relation approach for the reflection and transmission matrices, which is computationally stable compared to transfer matrix approaches.© 2013 Taylor and Francis.