Observation of localization of light in photonic quasicrystals of diverse symmetries

Abstract

Quasicrystals are ubiquitous in nature. Beyond crystalline solids, they can be created as optically induced or technologically fabricated structures in photonic and phononic systems, as potentials for cold atoms and Bose-Einstein condensates (BECs). On a parwith the unusual structural properties of quasicrystals, nowadays the problem of wave propagation in such two-dimensional structures attracts considerable attention, already in earlier studies it was predicted that the lowest electronic states in five-fold quasicrystals are localized. Later on localization of BECs in an eight-fold rotational symmetric quasicrystal optical lattices was observed. Direct observation of localization in purely linear photonic quasicrystals, therefore, remains elusive. Here, using sets of interfering plane waves, we create photonic two-dimensional quasicrystals with different rotational symmetries, not allowed in periodic crystallographic structures. We demonstrate experimentally that linear localization of light does occur even in clean linear quasicrystals for probe beams propagating both in the center and off-center regions of the quasicrystals. We found that light localization occurs above a critical depth of optically induced potential and that this critical depth rapidly decreases with the increase of the order of the discrete rotational symmetry of the quasicrystal. Our results clarify a long-standing problem of wave localization in linear quasicrystals and elucidate the conditions under which this phenomenon occurs. These findings pave the way for achieving wave localization in a wide variety of aperiodic systems obeying discrete symmetries, with possible applications in photonics, atomic physics, acoustics, and condensed matter.

21 pages, 8 figures

References in corpus (7)

• Localization and delocalization of light in photonic moire lattices
• Emergence of criticality through a cascade of delocalization transitions in quasiperiodic chains
• Moire quasi-bound states in the continuum
• Observing localisation in a 2D quasicrystalline optical lattice
• Strongly-Interacting Bosons in a Two-Dimensional Quasicrystal Lattice
• Localization transition in weakly-interacting Bose superfluids in one-dimensional quasiperdiodic lattices
• Quantum simulation of a 2D quasicrystal with cold atoms

Cited by in corpus (6)

• Two-dimensional flat-band solitons in superhoneycomb lattices
• Observation of Light Localization at the Edges of Quasicrystal Waveguide Arrays
• Anomalous proteinaceous shells with octagonal local order
• Vortex solitons in disclination quasicrystals
• Flat quasicrystalline tilings in terms of density wave approach
• Half-vortex soliton lattices in spin-orbit-coupled Bose-Einstein condensates with a quasi-flat band