Floquet topological insulator laser

Abstract

We introduce a class of topological lasers based on the photonic Floquet topological insulator concept. The proposed system is realized as a truncated array of the lasing helical waveguides, where the pseudo-magnetic field arises due to twisting of the waveguides along the propagation direction that breaks the time-reversal symmetry and opens up a topological gap. When sufficient gain is provided in the edge channels of the array then the system lases into the topological edge states. Topological lasing is stable only in certain intervals of the Bloch momenta, that ensure a dynamic, but stable balance between the linear amplification and nonlinear absorption leading to the formation of the breathing edge states. We also illustrate topological robustness of the edge currents by simulating lattice defects and triangular arrangements of the waveguides.

23 pages, 5 figures

References in corpus (10)

• Topological Photonics
• Photonic Analogue of Two-dimensional Topological Insulators and Helical One-Way Edge Transport in Bi-Anisotropic Metamaterials
• Topological Acoustics
• Measuring the Chern number of Hofstadter bands with ultracold bosonic atoms
• Edge Modes, Degeneracies, and Topological Numbers in Non-Hermitian Systems
• Photonic Topological Anderson Insulators
• Topological Polaritons
• Polariton $\mathbb{Z}$ Topological Insulator
• Disorder-induced Floquet Topological Insulators
• Topological Photonic Quasicrystals: Fractal Topological Spectrum and Protected Transport

Cited by in corpus (1)

• Non-Hermitian laser arrays with tunable phase locking