Photonic Chern insulator through homogenization of an array of particles

Abstract

We propose a route towards creating a metamaterial that behaves as a photonic Chern insulator, through homogenization of an array of gyromagnetic cylinders. We show that such an array can exhibit non-trivial topological effects, including topologically non-trivial band gaps and one-way edge states, when it can be homogenized to an effective medium model that has the Berry curvature strongly peaked at the wavevector k=0. The non-trivial band topology depends only on the parameters of the cylinders and the cylinders' density, and can be realized in a wide variety of different lattices including periodic, quasi-periodic and random lattices. Our system provides a platform to explore the interplay between disorder and topology and also opens a route towards synthesis of topological meta-materials based on the self-assembly approach.

15 pages, 4 figures

References in corpus (8)

• Topological Photonics
• Photonic Analogue of Two-dimensional Topological Insulators and Helical One-Way Edge Transport in Bi-Anisotropic Metamaterials
• Scheme to Achieve Silicon Topological Photonics
• Reflection-Free One-Way Edge Modes in a Gyromagnetic Photonic Crystal
• Topological Acoustics
• Observation of phononic helical edge states in a mechanical 'topological insulator'
• Disorder-induced Floquet Topological Insulators
• Topological Photonic Quasicrystals: Fractal Topological Spectrum and Protected Transport

Cited by in corpus (3)

• Structural and electronic properties of realistic two-dimensional amorphous topological insulators
• Topological Anderson insulators in an Ammann-Beenker quasicrystal and a snub-square crystal
• Cavity-induced backscattering in a two-dimensional photonic topological system