Topological phase transitions and chiral inelastic transport induced by the squeezing of light

Abstract

There is enormous interest in engineering topological photonic systems. Despite intense activity, most works on topological photonic states (and more generally bosonic states) amount in the end to replicating a well-known fermionic single-particle Hamiltonian. Here we show how the squeezing of light can lead to the formation of qualitatively new kinds of topological states. Such states are characterized by non-trivial Chern numbers, and exhibit protected edge modes, which give rise to chiral elastic and inelastic photon transport. These topological bosonic states are not equivalent to their fermionic (topological superconductor) counterparts and, in addition, cannot be mapped by a local transformation onto topological states found in particle-conserving models. They thus represent a new type of topological system. We study this physics in detail in the case of a kagome lattice model, and discuss possible realizations using nonlinear photonic crystals or superconducting circuits.

Photonic versus electronic quantum anomalous Hall effect

“…In the large Rashba SOC limit, this description was found to converge towards an extended Haldane model [14]. Another field, which has considerably grown these last years, is the emulation of such topological insulators with different types of particles, such as fermions (either charged, as electrons in nanocrystals [17,18], or neutral, such as fermionic atoms in optical lattices [19,20]) and bosons (atoms, photons, or mixed light-matter quasiparticles) [21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29]. The main advantage of artificial analogs is the possibility to tune the parameters [30], to obtain inaccessible regimes, and to measure quantities out of reach in the original systems.…”

Integer quantum magnon Hall plateau-plateau transition in a spin-ice model

“…[1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][11][12][13]20 On the one hand, these bosonic systems often break conservation of the quasi-particle number even at the level of respective quadratic Hamiltonian. 8,9,[11][12][13][14][15][16]19,[21][22][23][24][25][26][27] Thereby, one naturally wonders if the quasi-particle flow along the topological edge modes is still robust against such particle-number-nonconserving perturbations or not. In other words, one may raise a question whether two quantum Hall regimes with different Chern integers are topologically distinguishable even in the absence of the U(1) symmetry associated with the quasi-particle number conservation.…”

Interactive optomechanical coupling with nonlinear polaritonic systems

“…Other examples, where the merging of the concepts of optics and mechanics were shown to be useful, are optical and mechanical squeezing [6][7][8], the generation of entanglement [9,10], gravitational wave detection [11], optomechanically induced transparency (OMIT) [12,13], and quantum state teleportation [14]. The related optical manipulation of mechanical degrees of freedom extensively contributed to the fields of precise measurements and sensing [15][16][17][18][19][20], manybody physics [21][22][23], and was theorized to have implications for quantum computing [24] and communication [25].…”