Electrical manipulation of lightwaves in the uniaxially strained photonic honeycomb lattices under a pseudomagnetic field

Abstract

The realization of pseudomagnetic fields for lightwaves has attained great attention in the field of nanophotonics. Like real magnetic fields, Landau quantization could be induced by pseudomagnetic fields in the strain-engineered graphene. We demonstrated that pseudomagnetic fields can also be introduced to photonic crystals by exerting a linear parabolic deformation onto the honeycomb lattices, giving rise to degenerate energy states and flat plateaus in the photonic band structures. We successfully inspire the photonic snake modes corresponding to the helical state in the synthetic magnetic heterostructure by adopting a microdisk for the unidirectional coupling. By integrating heat electrodes, we can further electrically manipulate the photonic density of states for the uniaxially strained photonic crystal. This offers an unprecedented opportunity to obtain on-chip robust optical transports under the electrical tunable pseudomagnetic fields, opening the possibility to design Si-based functional topological photonic devices.