Observation of Topological Phase Transitions in Photonic Quasicrystals

Abstract

Topological insulators and topological superconductors are distinguished by their bulk phase transitions and gapless states at a sharp boundary with the vacuum. Quasicrystals have recently been found to be topologically nontrivial. In quasicrystals, the bulk phase transitions occur in the same manner as standard topological materials, but their boundary phenomena are more subtle. In this Letter we directly observe bulk phase transitions, using photonic quasicrystals, by constructing a smooth boundary between topologically distinct one-dimensional quasicrystals. Moreover, we use the same method to experimentally confirm the topological equivalence between the Harper and Fibonacci quasicrystals.

7 pages, 6 figures, 2 appendices

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• Evidence of Majorana fermions in an Al - InAs nanowire topological superconductor
• Topological Crystalline Insulators
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Cited by in corpus (26)

• Topological Photonics
• Nearest neighbor tight binding models with an exact mobility edge in one dimension
• Topological properties of linear circuit lattices
• Topological Pumping over a Photonic Fibonacci Quasicrystal
• Topological Photonic Quasicrystals: Fractal Topological Spectrum and Protected Transport
• Topological invariants of Floquet systems: General formulation, special properties, and Floquet topological defects
• Localization and adiabatic pumping in a generalized Aubry-André-Harper model
• Topological phase in a non-Hermitian PT symmetric system
• Topological Hofstadter Insulators in a Two-Dimensional Quasicrystal
• Virtual Topological Insulators with Real Quantized Physics
• Non-equilibrium phase diagram of a 1D quasiperiodic system with a single-particle mobility edge
• Kaleidoscope of symmetry protected topological phases in one-dimensional periodically modulated lattices
• Constructing a Weyl semimetal by stacking one dimensional topological phases
• Statistics-dependent quantum co-walking of two particles in one-dimensional lattices with nearest-neighbor interactions
• Generating controllable type-II Weyl points via periodic driving
• Line nodes and surface Majorana flat bands in static and kicked p-wave superconducting Harper model
• Simulation and measurement of the fractional particle number in one-dimensional optical lattices
• Quantum walks in commensurate off-diagonal Aubry-André-Harper model
• Spectral butterfly, mixed Dirac-Schrödinger fermion behavior and topological states in armchair uniaxial strained graphene
• Equilibrium phases of two-dimensional bosons in quasi-periodic lattices
• Topological incommensurate magnetization plateaus in quasi-periodic quantum spin chains
• Many-particle interference in a two-component bosonic Josephson junction: an all-optical simulation
• Topological origin of quantum mechanical vacuum transitions and tunneling
• Waves in almost-periodic particle chains
• Compressibility enhancement in an almost staggered interacting Harper model
• Persistent current in an almost staggered Harper model