No Arabic abstract
We analyze the transport of light in the bulk and at the edge of photonic Lieb lattices, whose unique feature is the existence of a flat band representing stationary states in the middle of the band structure that can form localized bulk states. We find that transport in bulk Lieb lattices is significantly affected by the particular excitation site within the unit cell, due to overlap with the flat band states. Additionally, we demonstrate the existence of new edge states in anisotropic Lieb lattices. These states arise due to a virtual defect at the lattice edges and are not described by the standard tight-binding model.
Topological invariants characterising filled Bloch bands attract enormous interest, underpinning electronic topological insulators and analogous artificial lattices for Bose-Einstein condensates, photons, and acoustic waves. In the latter bosonic systems there is no Fermi exclusion principle to enforce uniform band filling, which makes measurement of their bulk topological invariants challenging. Here we show how to achieve controllable filling of bosonic bands using leaky photonic lattices. Leaky photonic lattices host transitions between bound and radiative modes at a critical energy, which plays a role analogous to the electronic Fermi level. Tuning this effective Fermi level into a band gap results in disorder-robust dynamical quantization of bulk topological invariants such as the Chern number. Our findings establish leaky lattices as a novel and highly flexible platform for exploring topological and non-Hermitian wave physics.
We experimentally demonstrate topological edge states arising from the valley-Hall effect in twodimensional honeycomb photonic lattices with broken inversion symmetry. We break inversion symmetry by detuning the refractive indices of the two honeycomb sublattices, giving rise to a boron nitride-like band structure. The edge states therefore exist along the domain walls between regions of opposite valley Chern numbers. We probe both the armchair and zig-zag domain walls and show that the former become gapped for any detuning, whereas the latter remain ungapped until a cutoff is reached. The valley-Hall effect provides a new mechanism for the realization of time-reversal invariant photonic topological insulators.
Edge states emerge in diverse areas of science, offering new opportunities for the development of novel electronic or optoelectronic devices, sound and light propagation controls in acoustics and photonics. Previous experiments on edge states and exploration of topological phases in photonics were carried out mostly in linear regimes, but the current belief is that nonlinearity introduces new striking features into physics of edge states, lead-ing to the formation of edge solitons, optical isolation, and topological lasing, to name a few. Here we experimentally demonstrate edge solitons at the zigzag edge of a reconfigurable photonic graphene lattice created via the effect of electromagneti-cally induced transparency in an atomic vapor cell with controllable nonlinearity . To obtain edge solitons, Raman gain was introduced to compensate strong absorption experienced by the edge state during propagation. Our observations pave the way to ex-perimental exploration of topological photonics on nonlinear, reconfigurable platform.
We establish experimentally a photonic super-honeycomb lattice (sHCL) by use of a cw-laser writing technique, and thereby demonstrate two distinct flatband line states that manifest as noncontractible-loop-states in an infinite flatband lattice. These localized states (straight and zigzag lines) observed in the sHCL with tailored boundaries cannot be obtained by superposition of conventional compact localized states because they represent a new topological entity in flatband systems. In fact, the zigzag-line states, unique to the sHCL, are in contradistinction with those previously observed in the Kagome and Lieb lattices. Their momentum-space spectrum emerges in the high-order Brillouin zone where the flat band touches the dispersive bands, revealing the characteristic of topologically protected bandcrossing. Our experimental results are corroborated by numerical simulations based on the coupled mode theory. This work may provide insight to Dirac like 2D materials beyond graphene.
We experimentally study a Stub photonic lattice and excite their localized linear states originated from an isolated Flat Band at the center of the linear spectrum. By exciting these modes in different regions of the lattice, we observe that they do not diffract across the system and remain well trapped after propagating along the crystal. By using their wave nature, we are able to combine -- in phase and out of phase -- two neighbor states into a coherent superposition. These observations allow us to propose a novel setup for performing three different all-optical logical operations such as OR, AND, and XOR, positioning Flat Band systems as key setups to perform concrete applications at any level of power.