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PHOTONIC NETWORKS

Loss leads the way to utopia

Nature Physics volume 18, pages 371–372 (2022)Cite this article

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The interactions between coupled photonic resonators influence the properties of the whole network. Dissipative coupling extends the ability to engineer photonic networks and brings fully controllable, ‘utopian’ networks within reach.

Many systems can be classified as coupled networks, for example, networks of airports, neural networks or atomic lattices. All these different systems have in common that their behaviour is governed by the characteristics of the individual elements and by the interactions between them. Reconfigurable networks with tunable coupling between their constituting elements have great potential for developing new technologies and exploring exotic phenomena1,2,3. However, these explorations have mostly been confined to conservatively coupled systems, where no energy is lost in the coupling. Writing in Nature Physics, Christian Leefmans and colleagues report that they have now built a reconfigurable photonic resonator network with purely dissipative coupling to display non-trivial topology in the system’s dissipation rates4.

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Fig. 1: Reconfigurable time-multiplexed photonic resonator network and topological lattices with dissipative coupling.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Physics, Faculty of Science, University of Zagreb, Zagreb, Croatia

    Hrvoje Buljan

  2. The MOE Key Laboratory of Weak-Light Nonlinear Photonics, TEDA Applied Physics Institute and School of Physics, Nankai University, Tianjin, China

    Hrvoje Buljan & Zhigang Chen

  3. Faculty of Civil Engineering, University of Zagreb, Zagreb, Croatia

    Dario Jukić

  4. Department of Physics and Astronomy, San Francisco State University, San Francisco, CA, USA

    Zhigang Chen

Authors
  1. Hrvoje Buljan
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  2. Dario Jukić
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  3. Zhigang Chen
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Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Hrvoje Buljan, Dario Jukić or Zhigang Chen.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

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Buljan, H., Jukić, D. & Chen, Z. Loss leads the way to utopia. Nat. Phys. 18, 371–372 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41567-022-01518-x

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41567-022-01518-x

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