Parity anomaly and Landau-level lasing in strained photonic honeycomb lattices

Abstract

We describe the formation of highly degenerate, Landau-level-like amplified states in a strained photonic honeycomb lattice in which amplification breaks the sublattice symmetry. As a consequence of the parity anomaly, the zeroth Landau level is localized on a single sublattice and possesses an enhanced or reduced amplification rate. The spectral properties of the higher Landau levels are constrained by a generalized time-reversal symmetry. In the setting of two-dimensional photonic crystal lasers, the anomaly directly affects the mode selection and lasing threshold while in three-dimensional photonic lattices it can be probed via beam dynamics.

5 pages, 2 figures, submitted to journal in May 2012. v2: final version, including supplemental material (5+2 pages, 2+3 figures)

References in corpus (3)

• Analogs of quantum Hall effect edge states in photonic crystals
• PT-symmetry breaking and laser-absorber modes in optical scattering systems
• PT-Symmetric Talbot Effects

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