Active topological photonics

By Y. Ota, Kenta Takata, T. Ozawa, A. Amo, Zhetao Jia, B. Kanté, Masaya Notomi, Yasuhiko Arakawa, S. Iwamoto. Nanophotonics, 2019

254 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract Topological photonics emerged as a novel route to engineer the flow of light. Topologically protected photonic edge modes, which are supported at the perimeters of topologically nontrivial insulating bulk structures, are of particular interest as they may enable low-loss optical waveguides immune to structural disorder. Very recently, there has been a sharp rise of interest in introducing gain materials into such topological photonic structures, primarily aiming at revolutionizing semiconductor lasers with the aid of physical mechanisms existing in topological physics. Examples of remarkable realizations are topological lasers with unidirectional light output under time-reversal symmetry breaking and topologically protected polariton and micro/nanocavity lasers. Moreover, the introduction of gain and loss provides a fascinating playground to explore novel topological phases, which are in close relevance to non-Hermitian and parity-time symmetric quantum physics and are, in general, difficult to access using fermionic condensed matter systems. Here, we review the cutting-edge research on active topological photonics, in which optical gain plays a pivotal role. We discuss recent realizations of topological lasers of various kinds, together with the underlying physics explaining the emergence of topological edge modes. In such demonstrations, the optical modes of the topological lasers are determined by the dielectric structures and support lasing oscillation with the help of optical gain. We also address recent research on topological photonic systems in which gain and loss, themselves, essentially influence topological properties of the bulk systems. We believe that active topological photonics provides powerful means to advance micro/nanophotonics systems for diverse applications and topological physics, itself, as well.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/30680a68003d0fbde8f39ff46012c9e583455568

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In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

Citations in the corpus

Topological active matter (2020, background): “[40] Ota, Y.”
Higher-order non-Hermitian skin effect (2020, background): “Topological phases and their boundary physics are enriched also by non-Hermiticity [29, 30].”
Non-Bloch band theory of non-Hermitian Hamiltonians in the symplectic class (2020, methodology): “To understand the role of topology in non-Hermitian systems, topological characterization of non-Hermitian systems [14, 15] has recently been developed both in theory [16–58] and experiments [59–70].”