The Nature of Topological Protection in Spin and Valley Hall Insulators

Abstract

Recent interest in optical analogues to the quantum spin Hall and quantum valley Hall effects is driven by the promise to establish topologically protected photonic edge modes at telecommunication and optical wavelengths on a simple platform suitable for industrial applications. While first theoretical and experimental efforts have been made, these approaches so far both lack a rigorous understanding of the nature of topological protection and the limits of backscattering immunity. We here use a generic group theoretical methodology to fill this gap and obtain general design principles for purely dielectric two-dimensional topological photonic systems. The method comprehensively characterizes possible 2D hexagonal designs and reveals their topological nature, potential and limits.

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Cited by in corpus (12)

• Observation of strong backscattering in valley-Hall photonic topological interface modes
• Inverse design of higher-order photonic topological insulators
• Higher-order topology in plasmonic kagome lattices
• Evolution of topological edge modes from honeycomb photonic crystals to triangular-lattice photonic crystals
• Double Dirac Cones and Topologically Non-Trivial Phonons for Continuous, Square Symmetric (C${}_{4v}$ and C${}_{2v}$) Unit Cells
• Second-order topological modes in two-dimensional continuous media
• Near- and Far-Field Excitation of Topological Plasmonic Metasurfaces
• Robust Transport of the Edge Modes along the Photonic Topological Interfaces of Different Configurations
• Chern dartboard insulator: sub-Brillouin zone topology and skyrmion multipoles
• Topological phase transition of the centered rectangular photonic lattice
• Photonic quantum Hall effects
• Topological Pseudospin Hall Effect and Multi-frequency Corner Modes in Kagome-based Lattices