Topological Phases of Sound and Light

By V. Peano, C. Brendel, M. Schmidt, Florian Marquardt. 2014

338 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Topological states of matter are particularly robust, since they exploit global features insensitive to local perturbations. In this work, we describe how to create a Chern insulator of phonons in the solid state. The proposed implementation is based on a simple setting, a dielectric slab with a suitable pattern of holes. Its topological properties can be wholly tuned in-situ by adjusting the amplitude and frequency of a driving laser that controls the optomechanical interaction between light and sound. The resulting chiral, topologically protected phonon transport along the edges can be probed completely optically. Moreover, we identify a regime of strong mixing between photon and phonon excitations, which gives rise to a large set of different topological phases. This would be an example of a Chern insulator produced from the interaction between two physically very different particle species, photons and phonons.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Materials Chemistry

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e5c0f093eadeadbac4687e4da2c267f5c984724a

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In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

In Materials Chemistry

Citations in the corpus

Optomechanical creation of magnetic fields for photons on a lattice (2015, background): “On the other hand, if either the photon or phonon modes are occupied only virtually, then effective fluxes can still be generated for the remaining real excitations, even with a single laser, and this works best for phonons (see [40, 41]).”
Generalized non-reciprocity in an optomechanical circuit via synthetic magnetism and reservoir engineering (2016, background): “It was predicted that this could enable optically tunable nonreciprocal propagation in few-port devices [16–19], or in the case of a lattice of optomechanical cavities, topological phases of light and sound [1, 20].”
Nonreciprocity in acoustic and elastic materials (2020, background): “They have been subsequently investigated in acoustics 79–81 , photonics 71,82 and mechanics 83–87 , as well as in coupled wave domains such as opto-mechanics 88 .”
Experimental Observation of Topologically Protected Helical Edge Modes in Patterned Elastic Plates (2018, background): “Originally investigated in quantum systems, these concepts have been extended to several classical areas of physics, including acoustic [2–5], electromagnetic [6–8], elastic [9] and optomechanical [10] media.”
Photonic quadrupole topological phases (2018, background): “[21] Peano, V.”