Topological photonics

By Ling Lu, John D. Joannopoulos, Marin Soljačić. Nature Photonics, 2014

4,283 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Applying the mathematical concept of topology to the wave-vector space of photonics yields exciting opportunities for creating new states of light with useful properties such as unidirectional propagation and the ability to flow around imperfections. The application of topology, the mathematics of conserved properties under continuous deformations, is creating a range of new opportunities throughout photonics. This field was inspired by the discovery of topological insulators, in which interfacial electrons transport without dissipation, even in the presence of impurities. Similarly, the use of carefully designed wavevector-space topologies allows the creation of interfaces that support new states of light with useful and interesting properties. In particular, this suggests unidirectional waveguides that allow light to flow around large imperfections without back-reflection. This Review explains the underlying principles and highlights how topological effects can be realized in photonic crystals, coupled resonators, metamaterials and quasicrystals.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Electrical and Electronic Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/60d4f6116835de0b7db08b134bc3faec26e65efb

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In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

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Citations in the corpus

Artificial gauge fields in materials and engineered systems (2017, neutral): “These include photonics [17,48], phonons [20], and cold atoms [12,15].”
Engineered dissipation for quantum information science (2022, methodology): “Due to their topical nature, particular efforts have been made to come up with approaches to produce states which either exhibit topological order, or have topologically nontrivial band-structure 49,204,206–211 .”
Quantum Electrodynamics in a Topological Waveguide (2020, background): “Combining the notions from waveguide quantum electrodynamics (QED) [20,21,34,35] and topological photonics [2,3], we observe qubit-photon bound states with directional photonic envelopes inside a band gap and cooperative radiative emission from qubits inside a passband dependent on the topological c”