Photonic topological insulators.

By Alexander B. Khanikaev, S. H. Mousavi, Wang-Kong Tse, M. Kargarian, Allan H. MacDonald, G. Shvets. Nature Materials, 2012

1,551 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Recent progress in understanding the topological properties of condensed matter has led to the discovery of time-reversal-invariant topological insulators. A remarkable and useful property of these materials is that they support unidirectional spin-polarized propagation at their surfaces. Unfortunately topological insulators are rare among solid-state materials. Using suitably designed electromagnetic media (metamaterials) we theoretically demonstrate a photonic analogue of a topological insulator. We show that metacrystals-superlattices of metamaterials with judiciously designed properties-provide a platform for designing topologically non-trivial photonic states, similar to those that have been identified for condensed-matter topological insulators. The interfaces of the metacrystals support helical edge states that exhibit spin-polarized one-way propagation of photons, robust against disorder. Our results demonstrate the possibility of attaining one-way photon transport without application of external magnetic fields or breaking of time-reversal symmetry. Such spin-polarized one-way transport enables exotic spin-cloaked photon sources that do not obscure each other.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Electronic, Optical and Magnetic Materials, Materials Chemistry

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/67ef8663d6b59756b8b4b45bf9f4014146e57797

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In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

In Electronic, Optical and Magnetic Materials

In Materials Chemistry

Citations in the corpus

Roadmap on topological photonics (2022, positive): “A typical example is the superposition of transverse electric and transverse magnetic modes [10].”
Symmetry and Topology in Non-Hermitian Physics (2018, neutral): “[188] A.”
Topological Photonic Crystals: Physics, Designs, and Applications (2022, background): “10(b), interfaces of electromagnetic-dual topological metacrystals supported helical edge states that exhibit spin-polarized one-way propagation of light, which is robust against defects with some missing rods [119].”