  Guiding energy deliberately is one of the central elements in engineering and
information processing. It is often achieved by designing specific transport
channels in a suitable material. Topological metamaterials offer a way to
construct stable and efficient channels of unprecedented versatility. However,
due to their stability it can be tricky to terminate them or to temporarily
shut them off without changing the material properties massively. While a lot
of effort was put into realizing mechanical topological metamaterials, almost
no works deal with manipulating their edge channels in sight of applications.
Here, we take a step in this direction, by taking advantage of local symmetry
breaking potentials to build a switchable topological phonon channel.
