Gapless surface states in a lattice of coupled cavities: a photonic analog of topological crystalline insulators

Abstract

We show that a tetragonal lattice of weakly interacting cavities with uniaxial electromagnetic response is the photonic counterpart of topological crystalline insulators, a new topological phase of atomic band insulators. Namely, the frequency band structure stemming from the interaction of resonant modes of the individual cavities exhibits an omnidirectional band gap within which gapless surface states emerge for finite slabs of the lattice. Due to the equivalence of a topological crystalline insulator with its photonic-crystal analog, the frequency band structure of the latter can be characterized by a $Z_2$ topological invariant. Such a topological photonic crystal can be realized in the microwave regime as a three-dimensional lattice of dielectric particles embedded within a continuous network of thin metallic wires.

12 pages, 4 figures

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Cited by in corpus (16)

• Topological Photonics
• Topological Photonics
• A topological crystalline insulator (TCI) phase via topological phase transition and crystalline mirror symmetry
• Realization of a three-dimensional photonic topological insulator
• Topological non-symmorphic crystalline insulators
• Topological Edge Plasmon Modes between Diatomic Chains of Nanoparticles
• Aharonov-Bohm photonic cages in waveguide and coupled resonator lattices by synthetic magnetic fields
• Crystallographic splitting theorem for band representations and fragile topological photonic crystals
• Classification of topological crystalline insulators based on representation theory
• The Existence of Topological Edge States in Honeycomb Plasmonic Lattices
• Topological bands in two-dimensional networks of metamaterial elements
• Gapless surface states originated from accidentally degenerate quadratic band touching in a three-dimensional tetragonal photonic crystal
• Floquet-Weyl and Floquet-topological-insulator phases in a stacked two-dimensional ring-network lattice
• Fragile topological insulators protected by rotation symmetry without spin-orbit coupling
• Dirac plasmon polaritons and magnetic modes in topological-insulator nanoparticles
• Analytical solutions of topological surface states in a series of lattice models