Experimental landau-zener tunneling for wave redirection in nonlinear waveguides

We present an acoustic analog of the Landau-Zener-tunneling (LZT) quantum-mechanical effect and apply it for irreversible wave redirection in weakly coupled nonlinear waveguides under impulse excitation. Due to nonlinearity, LZT-induced wave redirection is passively self-tunable with energy, being realized only in a certain energy band, which can be precisely predicted by theoretical models. Apart from the macroscale experimental validation of the classical quantum LZT effect, the findings apply to a broad class of acoustical systems with nonlinearity, disorder, and weak coupling.