Observation of unidirectional backscattering-immune topological electromagnetic states

@article{Wang2009ObservationOU,
  title={Observation of unidirectional backscattering-immune topological electromagnetic states},
  author={Zheng Wang and Yidong Chong and Yidong Chong and John D. Joannopoulos and Marin Solja{\vc}i{\'c}},
  journal={Nature},
  year={2009},
  volume={461},
  pages={772-775},
  url={https://api.semanticscholar.org/CorpusID:4427789}
}
It is demonstrated that, like their electronic counterparts, electromagnetic CESs can travel in only one direction and are very robust against scattering from disorder; it is found that even large metallic scatterers placed in the path of the propagating edge modes do not induce reflections.
View on Nature
mit.edu
2,179 Citations
Highly Influential Citations
27
Background Citations
350
Methods Citations
55
Results Citations
6

2,179 Citations

Shaking photons out of a topological material

Over the past decade, there has been a great interest in topological effects, with concepts originally developed in the context of electron transport in condensed matter platforms now being extended…

Photonic Floquet topological insulators

This work proposes and experimentally demonstrate a photonic topological insulator free of external fields and with scatter-free edge transport—a photonic lattice exhibiting topologically protected transport of visible light on the lattice edges.

Detecting topological phases of microwave photons in a circuit quantum electrodynamics lattice

Topology is an important degree of freedom in characterising electronic systems. Recently, it also brings new theoretical frontiers and many potential applications in photonics. However, the…

Exciton-polariton topological insulator

It is demonstrated experimentally an exciton-polariton topological insulator that the topological edge mode goes around defects, and that its propagation direction can be reversed by inverting the applied magnetic field.

TOPOLOGICAL PHOTONIC STATES

As exotic phenomena in optics, topological states in photonic crystals have drawn much attention due to their fundamental significance and great potential applications. Because of the broken…

Microcavity polaritons for topological photonics [Invited]

Microcavity polaritons are light-matter quasiparticles that arise from the strong coupling between excitons and photons confined in a semiconductor microcavity. They are typically studied at visible…

Electromagnetic and gravitational responses of photonic Landau levels

This work measures three topological invariants of a quantum Hall material—photonic Landau levels in curved space—through local electromagnetic and gravitational responses of the bulk material and finds that these invariants converge to their global values when probed over increasing length scales (several magnetic lengths), consistent with the intuition that the bulk and edges of a system are distinguishable only for sufficiently large samples.

Microcavity polaritons for topological photonics

Microcavity polaritons are light-matter quasiparticles that arise from the strong coupling between excitons and photons confined in a semiconductor microcavity. They typically operate at visible or…

Symmetry classification of topological photonic crystals

In a seminal paper Haldane conjectured that topological phenomena are not particular to quantum systems, and indeed experiments realized unidirectional, backscattering-free edge modes with…

Observation of Unidirectional Solitonlike Edge States in Nonlinear Floquet Topological Insulators

A salient feature of solid-state topological materials in two dimensions is the presence of conducting electronic edge states that are insensitive to scattering by disorder. Such unidirectional edge…
...

31 References

Experimental observation of the quantum Hall effect and Berry's phase in graphene

An experimental investigation of magneto-transport in a high-mobility single layer of graphene observes an unusual half-integer quantum Hall effect for both electron and hole carriers in graphene.

A topological Dirac insulator in a quantum spin Hall phase

The direct observation of massive Dirac particles in the bulk of Bi0.9Sb0.1 is reported, which suggests that the observed surface state on the boundary of the bulk insulator is a realization of the ‘topological metal’, which has potential application in developing next-generation quantum computing devices that may incorporate ‘light-like’ bulk carriers and spin-textured surface currents.

Reflection-free one-way edge modes in a gyromagnetic photonic crystal.

It is shown that the TM modes in a gyromagnetic photonic crystal can be formally mapped to electronic wave functions in a periodic electromagnetic field, so that the only requirement for the existence of one-way edge modes is that the Chern number for all bands below a gap is nonzero.

Topological surface States in three-dimensional magnetic insulators.

This Letter gives an efficient algorithm to compute whether a given magnetic band structure has nontrivial Hopf invariant, a double-exchange-like tight-binding model that realizes the nontrivials case, and a numerical study of the surface states of this model.

Two-dimensional gas of massless Dirac fermions in graphene

This study reports an experimental study of a condensed-matter system (graphene, a single atomic layer of carbon) in which electron transport is essentially governed by Dirac's (relativistic) equation and reveals a variety of unusual phenomena that are characteristic of two-dimensional Dirac fermions.

Analogs of quantum-Hall-effect edge states in photonic crystals

Photonic crystals built with time-reversal-symmetry-breaking Faraday-effect media can exhibit chiral edge modes that propagate unidirectionally along boundaries across which the Faraday axis…

Inhibited spontaneous emission in solid-state physics and electronics.

If a three-dimensionally periodic dielectric structure has an electromagnetic band gap which overlaps the electronic band edge, then spontaneous emission can be rigorously forbidden.

Photonic Crystals: Molding the Flow of Light

Since it was first published in 1995, Photonic Crystals has remained the definitive text for both undergraduates and researchers on photonic band-gap materials and their use in controlling the…

Topological invariant and the quantization of the Hall conductance

Dissipationless Quantum Spin Current at Room Temperature

Although microscopic laws of physics are invariant under the reversal of the arrow of time, the transport of energy and information in most devices is an irreversible process. It is this…