Direct observation of photonic Landau levels and helical edge states in strained honeycomb lattices

Abstract

We report the realization of a synthetic magnetic field for photons and polaritons in a honeycomb lattice of coupled semiconductor micropillars. A strong synthetic field is induced in both the s and p orbital bands by engineering a uniaxial hopping gradient in the lattice, giving rise to the formation of Landau levels at the Dirac points. We provide direct evidence of the sublattice symmetry breaking of the lowest-order Landau level wavefunction, a distinctive feature of synthetic magnetic fields. Our realization implements helical edge states in the gap between n=0 and n=1 Landau levels, experimentally demonstrating a novel way of engineering propagating edge states in photonic lattices. In light of recent advances in the enhancement of polariton-polariton nonlinearities, the Landau levels reported here are promising for the study of the interplay between pseudomagnetism and interactions in a photonic system.

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Cited by in corpus (24)

• Coherent control of quantum topological states of light in Fock-state lattices
• Observation of supersymmetric pseudo-Landau levels in strained microwave graphene
• Experimental realization of chiral Landau levels in two-dimensional Dirac cone systems with inhomogeneous effective mass
• Realization of all-band-flat photonic lattices
• Photonic realization of a generic type of graphene edge states exhibiting topological flat band
• Landau levels in strained two-dimensional photonic crystals
• Fully quantum scalable description of driven dissipative lattice models
• Three-dimensional flat Landau levels in an inhomogeneous acoustic crystal
• Strain and pseudo-magnetic fields in optical lattices from density-assisted tunneling
• Modified Bose-Einstein condensation in an optical quantum gas
• Polariton spin jets through optical control
• Colloquium: Synthetic quantum matter in non-standard geometries
• Pseudomagnetic suppression of non-Hermitian skin effect
• Topological bulk solitons in a nonlinear photonic Chern insulator
• Simulating graphene dynamics in one-dimensional modulated ring array with synthetic dimension
• Topological phonons in arrays of ultracold dipolar particles
• Coupled oscillators model for hybridized optical phonon modes in contacting nanosized particles and quantum dot molecules
• Wave manipulation via delay-engineered periodic potentials
• Optical Snake States in Photonic Graphene
• Measurable fractional spin for quantum Hall quasiparticles on the disk
• Topological photonics in nanoscaled systems with far field radiation and polarization singularities
• Quantized valley Hall response from local bulk density variations
• Skew scattering and ratchet effect in photonic graphene
• Flux-induced midgap states between strain-engineered flat bands