Photonic spin lattices: symmetry constraints for skyrmion and meron topologies

Abstract

Symmetry governs many electronic and photonic phenomena in optics and condensed matter physics. Skyrmions and merons are prominent topological structures in magnetic materials, with the topological features determined by the interplay between anisotropy of a material and its magnetization. Here we theoretically show and experimentally demonstrate that the symmetry of the electromagnetic field determines the spin topological properties of the guided modes via spin-orbit coupling and may only result in either hexagonal spin-skyrmion or square spin-meron lattices. We also show that in the absence of spin-orbit coupling these spin topologies are degenerated in dynamic field-skyrmions, unifying description of electromagnetic field topologies. The results provide new understanding of electromagnetic field topology and its transformations as well as new opportunities for applications in quantum optics, spin-optics and topological photonics.

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Cited by in corpus (14)

• Optical skyrmions and other topological quasiparticles of light
• Water-Wave Vortices and Skyrmions
• On-Chip Optical Skyrmionic Beam Generators
• Intrinsic spin-momentum dynamics of surface electromagnetic waves in complex dispersive system
• Plasmonic Twistronics: Discovery of Plasmonic Skyrmion Bags
• Meron Spin Textures in Momentum Space Spawning from Bound States in the Continuum
• Space-Time Hopfion Crystals
• Spin/momentum properties of the paraxial optical beams
• Periodic skyrmionic textures via conformal cartographic projections
• Transverse spin angular momentum of space-time surface plasmon polariton wave packet
• Skyrmion Bag Robustness in Plasmonic Bilayer and Trilayer Moiré Superlattices
• Plasmonic Vortices Host Magnetoelectric Interactions
• Photonic Shankar skyrmion
• Spintwistronics: Photonic bilayer topological lattices tuning extreme spin-orbit interactions