Experimental measurement of the Berry curvature from anomalous transport

By M. Wimmer, H. Price, I. Carusotto, U. Peschel. Nature Physics, 2016

195 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The Berry curvature is essential to the study of the topological properties of a system, be it solid-state, atomic or photonic. In 1D photonic lattices there is a new clever way of measuring the Berry curvature. The geometric properties of energy bands underlie fascinating phenomena in many systems, including solid-state, ultracold gases and photonics. The local geometric characteristics such as the Berry curvature1 can be related to global topological invariants such as those classifying the quantum Hall states or topological insulators. Regardless of the band topology, however, any non-zero Berry curvature can have important consequences, such as in the semi-classical evolution of a coherent wavepacket. Here, we experimentally demonstrate that the wavepacket dynamics can be used to directly map out the Berry curvature. To this end, we use optical pulses in two coupled fibre loops to study the discrete time evolution of a wavepacket in a one-dimensional geometric ‘charge’ pump, where the Berry curvature leads to an anomalous displacement of the wavepacket. This is both the first direct observation of Berry curvature effects in an optical system, and a proof-of-principle demonstration that wavepacket dynamics can serve as a high-resolution tool for mapping out geometric properties.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e51f7859c37557ba8b07e336ea62bd0b37409d4e

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In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

1. Nathan Goldman
2. T. Ozawa
3. Andrea Alù
4. H. Price
5. M. Rechtsman
6. A. Amo
7. Alexander B. Khanikaev
8. I. Carusotto

Citations in the corpus

• Artificial gauge fields in materials and engineered systems (2017, unknown): “These ideas have been successfully realized in photonic systems [175,176,177] and ultracold atoms [178,179,180,181], and recently enabled studies of 4D quantum Hall physics based on 2D topological pumping [182,183].”
• Topological dissipation in a time-multiplexed photonic resonator network (2021, unknown): “Although previous studies have realized time-multiplexed random walks in synthetic photonic lattices 26,31–33 , these travelling-wave architectures relied on conservatively coupled fibre loops and functioned like real-space waveguide arrays.”
• Roadmap on topological photonics (2022, methodology): “Here we focus on synthetic dimensions formed by coupling states labelled by an internal photonic degree of freedom, such as frequency [57, 130], spatial/temporal mode structure [71, 131], or orbital angular momentum (OAM) [132] (see figure 14).”
• Topological photonics (2018, methodology): “Geometric pumping has been experimentally realized using a fiber loop architecture (Wimmer et al., 2017).”