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Robust optical delay lines with topological protection

Nature Physics volume 7, pages 907–912 (2011)Cite this article

Abstract

Phenomena associated with the topological properties of physical systems can be naturally robust against perturbations. This robustness is exemplified by quantized conductance and edge state transport in the quantum Hall and quantum spin Hall effects. Here we show how exploiting topological properties of optical systems can be used to improve photonic devices. We demonstrate how quantum spin Hall Hamiltonians can be created with linear optical elements using a network of coupled resonator optical waveguides (CROW) in two dimensions. We find that key features of quantum Hall systems, including the characteristic Hofstadter butterfly and robust edge state transport, can be obtained in such systems. As a specific application, we show that topological protection can be used to improve the performance of optical delay lines and to overcome some limitations related to disorder in photonic technologies.

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Figure 1: Schematics of the photonic system with a synthetic magnetic field.
Figure 2: Hofstadter butterfly spectrum.
Figure 3: Edge states and their dispersion.
Figure 4: Edge states versus CROW.
Figure 5: 1D localization versus robust edge states.

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Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank G. Solomon, E. Waks, S. Fan and B. Halperin for helpful discussions. This research was supported by the US Army Research Office MURI award W911NF0910406, NSF, AFOSR Quantum Simulation MURI, ARO-MURI on Atomtronics, Packard, DARPA QUEST, DARPA OLE and Harvard-MIT CUA.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Joint Quantum Institute, University of Maryland and NIST, College Park, Maryland 20742, USA

    Mohammad Hafezi & Jacob M. Taylor

  2. Physics Department, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138, USA

    Eugene A. Demler & Mikhail D. Lukin

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  1. Mohammad Hafezi
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Contributions

M.H., E.A.D., M.D.L. and J.M.T. contributed to the conceptual development of the project and editing of the manuscript. M.H. carried out the mathematical analysis and simulations and wrote the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Mohammad Hafezi.

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Hafezi, M., Demler, E., Lukin, M. et al. Robust optical delay lines with topological protection. Nature Phys 7, 907–912 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1038/nphys2063

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