Abstract
Photonic topological insulators offer the possibility to eliminate backscattering losses and improve the efficiency of optical communication systems. Despite considerable efforts, a direct experimental demonstration of theoretically predicted robust, lossless energy transport in topological insulators operating at near-infrared frequencies is still missing. Here, we combine the properties of a planar silicon photonic crystal and the concept of topological protection to design, fabricate and characterize an optical topological insulator that exhibits the valley Hall effect. We show that the transmittances are the same for light propagation along a straight topological interface and one with four sharp turns. This result quantitatively demonstrates the suppression of backscattering due to the non-trivial topology of the structure. The photonic-crystal-based approach offers significant advantages compared with other realizations of photonic topological insulators, such as lower propagation losses, the presence of a band gap for light propagating in the crystal-slab plane, a larger operating bandwidth, a much smaller footprint, compatibility with complementary metal–oxide–semiconductor fabrication technology, and the fact that it allows for operation at telecommunications wavelengths.
This is a preview of subscription content, access via your institution
Access options
Access Nature and 54 other Nature Portfolio journals
Get Nature+, our best-value online-access subscription
$29.99 / 30 days
cancel any time
Subscribe to this journal
Receive 12 print issues and online access
$259.00 per year
only $21.58 per issue
Rent or buy this article
Prices vary by article type
from$1.95
to$39.95
Prices may be subject to local taxes which are calculated during checkout
Similar content being viewed by others
Data availability
The data that support the plots within this paper and other findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.
Change history
17 December 2018
In the version of this Letter originally published, Fig. 5g in the Supplementary Information was missing the scale bar. This has now been corrected.
References
Kane, C. L. & Mele, E. J. Z2 topological order and the quantum spin Hall effect. Phys. Rev. Lett. 95, 146802 (2005).
Kane, C. L. & Mele, E. J. Quantum spin Hall effect in graphene. Phys. Rev. Lett. 95, 226801 (2005).
Moore, J. E. The birth of topological insulators. Nature 464, 194–198 (2010).
Bernevig, A. B. & Hughes, T. L. Topological Insulators and Topological Superconductors (Princeton Univ. Press, Princeton, 2013).
Ferreira, G. J. & Loss, D. Magnetically defined qubits on 3D topological insulators. Phys. Rev. Lett. 111, 106802 (2013).
Katmis, F. et al. A high-temperature ferromagnetic topological insulating phase by proximity coupling. Nature 533, 513–516 (2016).
Jotzu, G. et al. Experimental realization of the topological haldane model with ultracold fermions. Nature 515, 237–240 (2014).
Lu, J. et al. Observation of topological valley transport of sound in sonic crystals. Nat. Phys. 13, 369–375 (2016).
Umucalılar, R. O. & Carusotto, I. Artificial gauge field for photons in coupled cavity arrays. Phys. Rev. A 84, 043804 (2011).
Hafezi, M., Demler, E. A., Lukin, M. D. & Taylor, J. M. Robust optical delay lines with topological protection. Nat. Phys. 7, 907–912 (2011).
Khanikaev, A. B. et al. Photonic topological insulators. Nat. Mater. 12, 233–239 (2012).
Fang, K. J., Yu, Z. F. & Fan, S. H. Realizing effective magnetic field for photons by controlling the phase of dynamic modulation. Nat. Photon. 6, 782–787 (2012).
Hafezi, M., Mittal, S., Fan, J., Migdall, A. & Taylor, J. M. Imaging topological edge states in silicon photonics. Nat. Photon. 7, 1001–1005 (2013).
Rechtsman, M. C. et al. Photonic Floquet topological insulators. Nature 496, 196–200 (2013).
Barik, S. et al. A topological quantum optics interface. Science 359, 666–668 (2018).
Wang, Z., Chong, Y., Joannopoulos, J. D. & Soljačić, M. Observation of unidirectional backscattering-immune topological electromagnetic states. Nature 461, 772–775 (2009).
Mittal, S. et al. Topologically robust transport of photons in a synthetic gauge field. Phys. Rev. Lett. 113, 087403 (2014).
Chen, W. J. et al. Experimental realization of photonic topological insulator in a uniaxial metacrystal waveguide. Nat. Commun. 5, 5782 (2014).
Ma, T., Khanikaev, A. B., Mousavi, S. H. & Shvets, G. Guiding electromagnetic waves around sharp corners: topologically protected photonic transport in metawaveguides. Phys. Rev. Lett. 114, 127401 (2015).
Ma, T. & Shvets, G. Scattering-free edge states between heterogeneous photonic topological insulators. Phys. Rev. B 95, 165102 (2017).
Wu, X. et al. Direct observation of valley-polarized topological edge states in designer surface plasmon crystals. Nat. Commun. 8, 1304 (2017).
Wu, L. H. & Hu, X. Scheme for achieving a topological photonic crystal by using dielectric material. Phys. Rev. Lett. 114, 223901 (2015).
Ma, T. & Shvets, G. All-Si valley-Hall photonic topological insulator. New J. Phys. 18, 025012 (2016).
Chen, X.-D., Zhao, F.-L., Chen, M. & Dong, J.-W. Valley-contrasting physics in all-dielectric photonic crystals: orbital angular momentum and topological propagation. Phys. Rev. B 96, 020202 (2017).
Dong, J.-W., Chen, X.-D., Zhu, H., Wang, Y. & Zhang, X. Valley photonic crystals for control of spin and topology. Nat. Mater. 16, 298–302 (2016).
He, X.-T. et al. Silicon-on-insulator slab for topological valley transport. Preprint at https://arxiv.org/abs/1805.10962 (2018).
Dulkeith, E., McNab, S. J. & Vlasov, Y. A. Mapping the optical properties of slab-type two-dimensional photonic crystal waveguides. Phys. Rev. B 72, 115102 (2005).
Joannopoulos, J. D., Johnson, S. G., Winn, J. N. & Meade, R. D. Photonic Crystals Molding the Flow of Light 2nd edn (Princeton Univ. Press, Princeton, 2008).
Collins, M. J., Zhang, F., Bojko, R., Chrostowski, L. & Rechtsman, M. C. Integrated optical Dirac physics via inversion symmetry breaking. Phys. Rev. A. 94, 063827 (2016).
Barik, S., Miyake, H., DeGottardi, W., Waks, E. & Hafezi, M. Two-dimensionally confined topological edge states in photonic crystals. New J. Phys. 18, 113013 (2016).
Fukui, T., Hatsugai, Y. & Suzuki, H. Chern numbers in discretized Brillouin zone: efficient method of computing (spin) Hall conductances. J. Phys. Soc. Jpn 74, 1674–1677 (2005).
Bleu, O., Solnyshkov, D. D. & Malpuech, G. Quantum valley Hall effect and perfect valley filter based on photonic analogs of transitional metal dichalcogenides. Phys. Rev. B 95, 235431 (2017).
Shalaev, M. I., Desnavi, S., Walasik, W. & Litchinitser, N. M. Reconfigurable topological photonic crystal. New J. Phys. 20, 023040 (2018).
Reardon, C. P., Rey, I. H., Welna, K., O'Faolain, L. & Krauss, T. F. Fabrication and characterization of photonic crystal slow light waveguides and cavities. J. Vis. Exp. 69, e50216 (2012).
Acknowledgements
This work was supported by Army Research Office grants W911NF-15-1-0152 and W911NF-11-1-0297. The authors acknowledge discussions with A. Khanikaev.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Contributions
M.I.S. and N.M.L. proposed the initial idea. M.I.S. and W.W. designed and performed the analytical and numerical analysis of the structure. M.I.S. fabricated the sample, performed the experimental measurements and analysed the results. A.T. and Y.X. assisted with the fabrication and measurement process of the sample. W.W., M.I.S. and N.M.L. co-wrote the manuscript. N.M.L. supervised the work.
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Competing interests
The authors declare no competing interests.
Additional information
Publisher’s note: Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Supplementary information
Supplementary information
Supplementary Sections A–D
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Shalaev, M.I., Walasik, W., Tsukernik, A. et al. Robust topologically protected transport in photonic crystals at telecommunication wavelengths. Nature Nanotech 14, 31–34 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41565-018-0297-6
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41565-018-0297-6
This article is cited by
-
Slow light topological photonics with counter-propagating waves and its active control on a chip
Nature Communications (2024)
-
Programmable integrated photonics for topological Hamiltonians
Nature Communications (2024)
-
Non-Hermitian topological phase transitions controlled by nonlinearity
Nature Physics (2024)
-
Hyperbolic photonic topological insulators
Nature Communications (2024)
-
Detailed analysis of topological edge and corner states in valley-Hall-like photonic Kagome insulators
Applied Physics B (2024)