Meron Spin Textures in Momentum Space

Abstract

We reveal the meron and antimeron spin textures in momentum space in a photonic crystal slab. These spin textures in momentum space have not been previously noted either in electronic or photonic systems. Breaking the inversion symmetry of a honeycomb photonic crystal gaps out the Dirac cones at the corners of Brillouin zone. The spin textures of photonic bands near the gaps exhibit a meron or antimeron. Unlike the electronic systems, the spin texture of the photonic modes manifests directly in the polarization of the leakage radiation, as the Dirac points can be above the light line. The spin texture provides a direct approach to visualize the local Berry curvature. Our work highlights the significant opportunities of using photonic structures for the exploration of topological spin textures, with potential applications towards topologically robust ways to manipulate polarizations and other modal characteristics of light.

arXiv comment5 pages, 4 figures

References in corpus (17)

• Skyrmion Lattice in a Chiral Magnet
• MoS_2 as an ideal material for valleytronics: valley-selective circular dichroism and valley Hall effect
• Advances in the Physics of Magnetic Skyrmions and Perspective for Technology
• Valley contrasting physics in graphene: magnetic moment and topological transport
• Spontaneous Skyrmion Ground States in Magnetic Metals
• Photonic Analogue of Two-dimensional Topological Insulators and Helical One-Way Edge Transport in Bi-Anisotropic Metamaterials
• Discovery of Magnetic Antiskyrmions Beyond Room Temperature in Tetragonal Heusler Materials
• All-Si Valley-Hall Photonic Topological Insulator
• Optical skyrmions in evanescent electromagnetic fields
• Valley-protected backscattering suppression in silicon photonic graphene
• Valley-contrasting orbital angular momentum in photonic valley crystals
• Observation of optical vortices in momentum space
• Experimental Measurement of the Berry Curvature from Anomalous Transport
• Photonic-crystal slabs with a triangular lattice of triangular holes investigated using a guided-mode expansion method
• Photonic Dirac monopoles and skyrmions: spin-1 quantization
• Skyrmions and antiskyrmions in quasi-two-dimensional magnets
• Observing half and integer polarization vortices at band degeneracies

Cited by in corpus (21)

• Optical skyrmions and other topological quasiparticles of light
• Generation and Annihilation of Topologically-Protected Bound States in the Continuum and Circularly-Polarized States by Symmetry Breaking
• Generation of tunable optical skyrmions on Skyrme-Poincaré sphere
• Supertoroidal light pulses: Propagating electromagnetic skyrmions in free space
• Observation of Topologically Robust Localized Magnetic Plasmon Skyrmions
• Vectorial light-matter interaction -- exploring spatially structured complex light fields
• Microcavity-based Generation of Full Poincaré Beams with Arbitrary Skyrmion Numbers
• Topological Polarization Singularities in Metaphotonics
• Topological metasurface: From passive toward active and beyond
• Extremize Optical Chiralities through Polarization Singularities
• On-Chip Optical Skyrmionic Beam Generators
• Evolution and global charge conservation for polarization singularities emerging from nonhermitian degeneracies
• Symmetry-protected photonic chiral spin textures by spin-orbit coupling
• Meron Spin Textures in Momentum Space Spawning from Bound States in the Continuum
• Triple-meron crystal in high-spin Kitaev magnets
• Photonic Berry curvature in double liquid crystal microcavities with broken inversion symmetry
• Simulating topological materials with photonic synthetic dimensions in cavities
• Topological winding guaranteed coherent orthogonal scattering
• Inverse design of dual-band valley-Hall topological photonic crystals with arbitrary pseudospin states
• Phase fields in momentum space of photonic crystal slabs
• Signatures of topological phase transitions in the s-wave superconductor at finite temperature