Strain-induced pseudomagnetic field and photonic Landau levels in dielectric structures

By M. Rechtsman, J. M. Zeuner, A. Tünnermann, S. Nolte, Mordechai Segev, Alexander Szameit. Nature Photonics, 2012

373 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Magnetic effects at optical frequencies are notoriously weak, so magneto-optical devices must be large to create a sufficient effect. In graphene, it has been shown that inhomogeneous strains can induce ‘pseudomagnetic fields’ that behave in a similar manner to real ones. Here, we show experimentally and theoretically that it is possible to induce such a field at optical frequencies in a photonic lattice. To our knowledge, this is the first realization of a pseudomagnetic field in optics. The field yields ‘photonic Landau levels’ separated by bandgaps in the spatial spectrum of the structured dielectric lattice. The gaps between these highly degenerate levels lead to transverse optical confinement. The use of strain allows for the exploration of magnetic-like effects in a non-resonant way that would be otherwise inaccessible in optics. It also suggests the possibility that aperiodic photonic-crystal structures can achieve greater field enhancement and slow-light effects than periodic structures via high density of states at the Landau levels. Generalizing these concepts to systems beyond optics, such as matter waves in optical potentials, offers new intriguing physics that is fundamentally different from that in purely periodic structures. Magnetic effects are fundamentally weak at optical frequencies. Now, by applying inhomogeneous strain in photonic band structures of a honeycomb lattice of waveguides, scientists show experimentally and theoretically that it is possible to induce a pseudomagnetic field at optical frequencies. The field yields 'photonic Landau levels', which suggests the possibility of achieving greater field enhancements and slow-light effects in aperiodic photonic crystal structures than those available in periodic structures.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4653eb495253baa34a13bc494dd15584981d8b1b

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Citations in the corpus

Ultrafast-laser-inscribed 3D integrated photonics: challenges and emerging applications (2015, methodology): “Using hexagonal waveguide arrays, the structure of graphene has been extensively studied, such as the influence of strain resulting in Landau levels [182], compression of the lattice [183], the influence of disorder on the edge states [184] as well as the band collapse under the influence of an exte”
Artificial gauge fields in materials and engineered systems (2017, neutral): “[302]), c0 is the coupling constant at distance r = a and l0 characterizes the decay of the coupling strength with distance.”
Topological Acoustic Delay Line (2018, background): “Breaking of the appropriate point group and translational symmetries can provide a general approach to pseudomagnetic fields [33,51,52] for Dirac quasiparticles.”
Spawning rings of exceptional points out of Dirac cones (2015, methodology): “Figure 1b, c shows the complex eigenvalues of the photonic crystal slab structure calculated numerically (symbols), which closely follow the analytic model of equation (2) shown as solid lines in the figure.”
Time- and Site-Resolved Dynamics in a Topological Circuit (2013, methodology): “In the optical domain, synthetic magnetic fields were realized via strain of a honeycomb lattice [29].”
Exciton-polaritons in lattices: A non-linear photonic simulator (2016, background): “Remarkable observations using these lattices include Bloch oscillations [22,23], dynamic localisation [24], modulation assisted tunnelling [25], Anderson localisation [5], transport in quasi-crystals [12,26], edge states in honeycomb lattices [27,28] or the implementation of artificial gauge fields ”