Valley vortex states and degeneracy lifting via photonic higher-band excitation

Abstract

We demonstrate valley-dependent vortex generation in a photonic graphene. Without breaking the inversion symmetry, excitation of two equivalent valleys leads to formation of an optical vortex upon Bragg-reflection to the third valley, with its chirality determined by the valley degree of freedom. Vortex-antivortex pairs with valley-dependent topological charge flipping are also observed and corroborated by numerical simulations. Furthermore, we develop a three-band effective Hamiltonian model to describe the dynamics of the coupled valleys, and find that the commonly used two-band model is not sufficient to explain the observed vortex degeneracy lifting. Such valley-polarized vortex states arise from high-band excitation without inversion symmetry breaking or synthetic-field-induced gap opening. Our results from a photonic setting may provide insight for the study of valley contrasting and Berry-phase mediated topological phenomena in other systems.

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Cited by in corpus (8)

• Circularly polarized states spawning from bound states in the continuum
• Topological photonic crystals: physics, designs and applications
• Topological metasurface: From passive toward active and beyond
• Topological Valley Hall Edge State Lasing
• Elastic Valley Spin Controlled Chiral Coupling in Topological Valley Phononic Crystals
• Rabi-like oscillation of photonic topological valley Hall edge states
• Anisotropic nonlinear refractive index measurement of a photorefractive crystal via spatial self-phase modulation
• Topological phenomena demonstrated in photorefractive photonic lattices