Skip to main content

Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles and JavaScript.

TOPOLOGICAL PHOTONICS

Thouless pumping of light with a twist

Nature Physics (2022)Cite this article

Subjects

An experiment with photonic waveguides demonstrates the connection between non-Abelian holonomies and adiabatic particle transport, paving the way to the geometric and topological control of light trajectories.

Gauge symmetries are a cornerstone of physics. They emerge in condensed-matter physics, in particle physics and in both the classical and quantum description of gravity. As first noted by Wilczek and Zee, gauge symmetries and the corresponding gauge fields also arise in the description of simple quantum-mechanical systems1. Now, writing in Nature Physics, Yi-Ke Sun and co-workers have unveiled the effects of the Wilczek–Zee gauge connection on light propagation in photonic waveguide lattices with their successful observation2 of non-Abelian Thouless pumping3 of light.

Your institute does not have access to this article

Access options

Buy article

Get time limited or full article access on ReadCube.

$32.00

Buy

All prices are NET prices.

Fig. 1: Evolution of the wave-function during a simple yet realistic non-Abelian pumping cycle.

References

  1. Wilczek, F. & Zee, A. Phys. Rev. Lett. 52, 2111 (1984).

    ADS  MathSciNet  Article  Google Scholar 

  2. Sun, Y.-K. et al. Nat. Phys. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41567-022-01669-x (2022).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  3. Brosco, V., Pilozzi, L., Fazio, R. & Conti, C. Phys. Rev. A 103, 063518 (2021).

    ADS  Article  Google Scholar 

  4. Thouless, D. J. Phys. Rev. B 27, 6083 (1983).

    ADS  MathSciNet  Article  Google Scholar 

  5. Berry, M. V. Proc. R. Soc. Lond. 392, 45–57 (1984).

    ADS  Google Scholar 

  6. Lu, L., Joannopoulos, J. D. & Soljačić, M. Nat. Phys. 12, 626–629 (2016).

    Article  Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute for Complex Systems, National Research Council (ISC-CNR), Rome, Italy

    Laura Pilozzi & Valentina Brosco

  2. Research Center Enrico Fermi, Rome, Italy

    Laura Pilozzi & Valentina Brosco

  3. Department of Physics, University Sapienza, Rome, Italy

    Valentina Brosco

Authors
  1. Laura Pilozzi
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Valentina Brosco
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Laura Pilozzi.

Ethics declarations

Competing interests

The authors declare no competing interests.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and Permissions

About this article

Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Pilozzi, L., Brosco, V. Thouless pumping of light with a twist. Nat. Phys. (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41567-022-01675-z

Download citation

  • Published:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41567-022-01675-z

Search

Advanced search

Quick links

Nature Briefing

Sign up for the Nature Briefing newsletter — what matters in science, free to your inbox daily.

Get the most important science stories of the day, free in your inbox. Sign up for Nature Briefing