Look at a quasicrystal close up and it seems to have little pattern. But scale out and an ordered arrangement soon emerges. Yaacov Kraus and colleagues now show that an optical quasicrystal is a means for efficient photon transfer with little loss.
Kraus et al. investigated a one-dimensional quasicrystal comprising a series of microscale optical waveguides side-by-side. They show that light sent down the middle waveguide quickly spreads out to the neighbouring channels as it propagates. If the light is sent down a waveguide on the edge, however, the photons emerge as a tightly localized beam from the guide at the other edge of the quasicrystal.
The researchers highlight that this unexpected effect has many similarities with the electronic properties of topological insulators — where states exist at the surface of an insulating material enabling a current to flow. In both cases, a system with a small number of dimensions displays characteristics associated with a higher-dimensional one. This analogy might aid better understanding of topological states and their application.
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Gevaux, D. Mid-guide spread. Nature Phys 8, 702 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1038/nphys2450
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nphys2450