Non-Hermitian and topological photonics: optics at an exceptional point

By M. Parto, Yuzhou G. N. Liu, B. Bahari, Mercedeh Khajavikhan, Demetrios N. Christodoulides. Frontiers in Optics and Photonics, 2020

260 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract In the past few years, concepts from non-Hermitian (NH) physics, originally developed within the context of quantum field theories, have been successfully deployed over a wide range of physical settings where wave dynamics are known to play a key role. In optics, a special class of NH Hamiltonians – which respects parity-time symmetry – has been intensely pursued along several fronts. What makes this family of systems so intriguing is the prospect of phase transitions and NH singularities that can in turn lead to a plethora of counterintuitive phenomena. Quite recently, these ideas have permeated several other fields of science and technology in a quest to achieve new behaviors and functionalities in nonconservative environments that would have otherwise been impossible in standard Hermitian arrangements. Here, we provide an overview of recent advancements in these emerging fields, with emphasis on photonic NH platforms, exceptional point dynamics, and the very promising interplay between non-Hermiticity and topological physics.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/54248608cfc960631c4cdbf2322280155623c8a0

Citations in the corpus

• Topological dissipation in a time-multiplexed photonic resonator network (2021, unknown): “Immediate extensions of our current experiments include exploring non-Hermitian 53,54 and nonlinear 55 topological behaviours in dissipatively coupled time-multiplexed networks.”