No Arabic abstract
Photonic crystals have been demonstrated as a versatile platform for the study of topological phenomena. The recent discovery of higher order topological insulators introduces new aspects of topological photonic crystals which are yet to be explored. Here, we propose a dielectric photonic crystal with unconventional higher order band topology. Besides the conventional spectral features of gapped edge states and in gap corner states, topological band theory predicts that the corner boundary of the higher-order topological insulator hosts a 2/3 fractional charge. We demonstrate that in the photonic crystal such a fractional charge can be verified from the local density of states of photons, through the concept of local spectral charge as an analog of the local electric charge due to band filling anomaly in electronic systems. Furthermore, we show that by introducing a disclination in the proposed photonic crystal, localized states and a 2/3 fractional spectral charge emerge around the disclination core, as the manifestation of the bulk disclination correspondence. The predicted effects can be readily observed in the state-of-the-art experiments and may lead to potential applications in integrated and quantum photonics.
We report on the higher-order photon correlations of a high-$beta$ nanolaser under pulsed excitation at room temperature. Using a multiplexed four-element superconducting single photon detector we measured g$^{(n)}(vec{0})$ with $n$=2,3,4. All orders of correlation display partially chaotic statistics, even at four times the threshold excitation power. We show that this departure from coherence and Poisson statistics is due to the quantum fluctuations associated with the small number of dipoles and photons involved in the lasing process.
Higher-order modes up to LP$_{33}$ are controllably excited in water-filled kagom{e}- and bandgap-style hollow-core photonic crystal fibers (HC-PCF). A spatial light modulator is used to create amplitude and phase distributions that closely match those of the fiber modes, resulting in typical launch efficiencies of 10-20% into the liquid-filled core. Modes, excited across the visible wavelength range, closely resemble those observed in air-filled kagom{e} HC-PCF and match numerical simulations. Mode indices are obtained by launching plane-waves at specific angles onto the fiber input-face and comparing the resulting intensity pattern to that of a particular mode. These results provide a framework for spatially-resolved sensing in HC-PCF microreactors and fiber-based optical manipulation.
Photonic components based on structured metallic elements show great potential for device applications where field enhancement and confinement of the radiation on a subwavelength scale is required. In this paper we report a detailed study of a prototypical metallo-dielectric photonic structure, where features well known in the world of dielectric photonic crystals, like band gaps and defect modes, are exported to the metallic counterpart, with interesting applications to infrared science and technology, as for instance in quantum well infrared photodetectors, narrow-band spectral filters, and tailorable thermal emitters.
Topological phases of matter are classified based on their Hermitian Hamiltonians, whose real-valued dispersions together with orthogonal eigenstates form nontrivial topology. In the recently discovered higher-order topological insulators (TIs), the bulk topology can even exhibit hierarchical features, leading to topological corner states, as demonstrated in many photonic and acoustic artificial materials. Naturally, the intrinsic loss in these artificial materials has been omitted in the topology definition, due to its non-Hermitian nature; in practice, the presence of loss is generally considered harmful to the topological corner states. Here, we report the experimental realization of a higher-order TI in an acoustic crystal, whose nontrivial topology is induced by deliberately introduced losses. With local acoustic measurements, we identify a topological bulk bandgap that is populated with gapped edge states and in-gap corner states, as the hallmark signatures of hierarchical higher-order topology. Our work establishes the non-Hermitian route to higher-order topology, and paves the way to exploring various exotic non-Hermiticity-induced topological phases.
We demonstrate tunable frequency-converted light mediated by a chi-(2) nonlinear photonic crystal nanocavity. The wavelength-scale InP-based cavity supports two closely-spaced localized modes near 1550 nm which are resonantly excited by a 130 fs laser pulse. The cavity is simultaneously irradiated with a non-resonant probe beam, giving rise to rich second-order scattering spectra reflecting nonlinear mixing of the different resonant and non-resonant components. In particular, we highlight the radiation at the sum frequencies of the probe beam and the respective cavity modes. This would be a useful, minimally-invasive monitor of the joint occupancy state of multiple cavities in an integrated optical circuit.