Two-dimensional Thouless pumping of light in photonic moiré lattices

Abstract

Continuous and quantized transports are profoundly different. The latter is determined by the global rather than local properties of a system, it exhibits unique topological features, and its ubiquitous nature causes its occurrence in many areas of science. Here we report the first observation of fully-two-dimensional Thouless pumping of light by bulk modes in a purpose-designed tilted moiré lattices imprinted in a photorefractive crystal. Pumping in such unconfined system occurs due to the longitudinal adiabatic and periodic modulation of the refractive index. The topological nature of this phenomenon manifests itself in the magnitude and direction of shift of the beam center-of-mass averaged over one pumping cycle. \rev{Our experimental results are supported by systematic numerical simulations in the frames of the continuous Schrödinger equation governing propagation of probe light beam in optically-induced photorefractive moiré lattice.} Our system affords a powerful platform for the exploration of topological pumping in tunable commensurate and incommensurate geometries.

19 pages, 3 figures, to appear in Nature Communications

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• Photonic topological pumping through the edges of a dynamical four-dimensional quantum Hall system
• Exploring 4D Quantum Hall Physics with a 2D Topological Charge Pump
• Exponential localization of Wannier functions in insulators
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• Topological charge pumping by sliding moiré pattern
• Topological Sliding Moiré Heterostructure

Cited by in corpus (14)

• Critical phase dualities in 1D exactly-solvable quasiperiodic models
• Plasmonic Twistronics: Discovery of Plasmonic Skyrmion Bags
• Nonlinear Thouless Pumping of Solitons Across an Impurity
• Hidden self-duality and exact mobility edges in quasiperiodic network models
• Skyrmion Bag Robustness in Plasmonic Bilayer and Trilayer Moiré Superlattices
• Topological Lasing from Thouless Pumping in Bilayer Photonic Crystal
• Light gap bullets in defocusing media with optical lattices
• Exact mobility edges in quasiperiodic network models with slowly varying potentials
• Quasiperiodic Quadrupole Insulators
• Fate of Quadratic Band Crossing under quasiperiodic modulation
• Family of self-dual quasicrystals with critical Phases
• Quantized transport of solitons in Bose-Einstein condensates driven by spin-orbit coupling
• Quantized transport of two-dimensional multifrequency solitons
• Bloch-Landau-Zener Oscillations in Moiré Lattices