State-recycling and time-resolved imaging in topological photonic lattices

Abstract

Photonic lattices - arrays of optical waveguides - are powerful platforms for simulating a range of phenomena, including topological phases. While probing dynamics is possible in these systems, by reinterpreting the propagation direction as "time," accessing long timescales constitutes a severe experimental challenge. Here, we overcome this limitation by placing the photonic lattice in a cavity, which allows the optical state to evolve through the lattice multiple times. The accompanying detection method, which exploits a multi-pixel single-photon detector array, offers quasi-real time-resolved measurements after each round trip. We apply the state-recycling scheme to intriguing photonic lattices emulating Dirac fermions and Floquet topological phases. In this new platform, we also realise a synthetic pulsed electric field, which can be used to drive transport within photonic lattices. This work opens a new route towards the detection of long timescale effects in engineered photonic lattices and the realization of hybrid analogue-digital simulators.

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References in corpus (11)

• Topological Photonics
• Topological characterization of periodically-driven quantum systems
• Quantum walks of correlated particles
• Observation of photonic anomalous Floquet Topological Insulators
• Topological Transition in a Non-Hermitian Quantum Walk
• Experimental observation of anomalous topological edge modes in a slowly-driven photonic lattice
• Detection of Zak phases and topological invariants in a chiral quantum walk of twisted photons
• Experimental Measurement of the Berry Curvature from Anomalous Transport
• Helical Floquet Channels in 1D Lattices
• Non-diffracting states in one-dimensional Floquet photonic topological insulators
• Multiplexed Single-Mode Wavelength-to-Time Mapping of Multimode Light

Cited by in corpus (26)

• Topological Photonics
• Observation of Topological Band Gap Solitons
• Topology and Broken Symmetry in Floquet Systems
• Non-Hermitian Floquet topological phases: Exceptional points, coalescent edge modes, and the skin effect
• Observation of unidirectional soliton-like edge states in nonlinear Floquet topological insulators
• Realization of Anomalous Floquet Insulators in Strongly-Coupled Nanophotonic Lattices
• Floquet higher order topological insulator in a periodically driven bipartite lattice
• Hopf characterization of two-dimensional Floquet topological insulators
• Nonlinear dynamics of Aharonov-Bohm cages
• How to Directly Measure Floquet Topological Invariants in Optical Lattices
• Generating quantum multi-criticality in topological insulators by periodic driving
• Generalized bulk-boundary correspondence in periodically driven non-Hermitian systems
• Eigenvalue Measurement of Topologically Protected Edge states in Split-Step Quantum Walks
• Light-matter interactions near photonic Weyl points
• Simulation of two-boson bound states using arrays of driven-dissipative coupled linear optical resonators
• Floquet-engineered nonlinearities and controllable pair-hopping processes: From optical Kerr cavities to correlated quantum matter
• Cross-dimensional universality classes in static and periodically driven Kitaev models
• Floquet engineering of optical nonlinearities: a quantum many-body approach
• Anomalous topological edge modes in a periodically-driven trimer lattice
• Periodic driving induced helical Floquet channels with ultracold atoms in momentum space
• Simulating Floquet topological phases in static systems
• Non-Abelian geometric phases in periodically driven systems
• Probing the Topological Anderson Transition in Quasiperiodic Photonic Lattices via Chiral Displacement and Wavelength Tuning
• Artificial gauge fields in the t-z mapping for optical pulses: spatio-temporal wavepacket control and quantum Hall physics
• Synthetic mean-field interactions in photonic lattices
• The gauge coupled two-body problem in a ring