Chiral and topological phonons in the square-octagon lattice

Controlling chirality and topology in phonon systems requires microscopic routes to reshape optical modes, open symmetry-governed gaps, and understand the robustness of the resulting chiral vibrational structure against disorder. The square-octagon lattice provides a natural platform for this purpose because its four-site basis generates internal optical modes and symmetry-allowed band crossings that are sensitive to the range of elastic couplings. We show that extended interactions, mass imbalance, and time-reversal symmetry (TRS) breaking provide an effective means to control these features. In particular, third-nearest-neighbor coupling releases otherwise nearly frozen optical branches, demonstrating that longer-range restoring pathways are essential for activating internal motions of the multi-site basis. Once TRS is broken, the symmetry-allowed line crossings are converted into avoided crossings, producing phonon modes with finite circular polarization. The resulting Berry curvature is concentrated near these gapped regions, and the relevant bands acquire opposite Chern numbers, identifying a topological chiral-phonon phase. We further find that the chiral sector remains most robust under mass disorder and is more strongly suppressed by spring disorder, while local chiral motion and the spectral identity of the chiral sector survive more strongly than the coherent global chiral response.