Imaging topological edge states in silicon photonics

By M. Hafezi, S. Mittal, J. Fan, A. Migdall, J. M. Taylor. Nature Photonics, 2013

1,503 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Topological features—global properties not discernible locally—emerge in systems ranging from liquid crystals to magnets to fractional quantum Hall systems. A deeper understanding of the role of topology in physics has led to a new class of matter—topologically ordered systems. The best known examples are quantum Hall effects, where insensitivity to local properties manifests itself as conductance through edge states that is insensitive to defects and disorder. Current research into engineering topological order primarily focuses on analogies to quantum Hall systems, where the required magnetic field is synthesized in non-magnetic systems. Here, we realize synthetic magnetic fields for photons at room temperature, using linear silicon photonics. We observe, for the first time, topological edge states of light in a two-dimensional system and show their robustness against intrinsic and introduced disorder. Our experiment demonstrates the feasibility of using photonics to realize topological order in both non-interacting and many-body regimes. Topological edge states of light are observed in a two-dimensional array of coupled optical ring resonators, which induce a virtual magnetic field for photons using silicon-on-insulator technology. The edge states are experimentally demonstrated to be robust against intrinsic and introduced disorder, which is a hallmark of topological order.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/6b5991d445b24bc0951454a4d257c438deb48129

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Citations in the corpus

Topological insulator laser: Experiments (2018, background): “Along these lines, unidirectional topological states were observed in microwave settings (9) in the presence of a magnetic field (the electromagnetic analog of the quantum Hall effect), and, more recently, topologically protected transport phenomena have been successfully demonstrated in optical pas”
Topological photonics (2014, methodology): “Starting with an introduction to the relevant topological concepts, we introduce the 2D quantum Hall phase through the stability of Dirac cones [4, 5], followed by its realizations in gyromagnetic photonic crystals [7, 8, 13], in coupled resonators [9, 10, 16] and waveguides [15], in bianisotropic m”
Quantum matter built from nanoscopic lattices of atoms and photons (2018, background): “In the optical domain, topological edge states have been observed in a number of linear photonic systems (absent atoms) such as helical waveguides (Rechtsman et al., 2013) and coupled resonator arrays (Hafezi et al., 2013).”