Topological Photonics

TL;DR

Topological photonics explores how geometrical and topological principles can be used to control light, enabling robust, unidirectional propagation and opening new avenues for exotic states and applications in photonic systems.

Contribution

This review synthesizes recent experimental and theoretical advances in topological photonics across diverse platforms, highlighting new topological phases and effects.

Findings

Robust unidirectional light propagation demonstrated

Multiple topological phases realized in photonic systems

Potential for novel strongly correlated light states

Abstract

Topological photonics is a rapidly emerging field of research in which geometrical and topological ideas are exploited to design and control the behavior of light. Drawing inspiration from the discovery of the quantum Hall effects and topological insulators in condensed matter, recent advances have shown how to engineer analogous effects also for photons, leading to remarkable phenomena such as the robust unidirectional propagation of light, which hold great promise for applications. Thanks to the flexibility and diversity of photonics systems, this field is also opening up new opportunities to realize exotic topological models and to probe and exploit topological effects in new ways. This article reviews experimental and theoretical developments in topological photonics across a wide range of experimental platforms, including photonic crystals, waveguides, metamaterials, cavities, optomechanics, silicon photonics, and circuit QED. A discussion of how changing the dimensionality and symmetries of photonics systems has allowed for the realization of different topological phases is offered, and progress in understanding the interplay of topology with non-Hermitian effects, such as dissipation, is reviewed. As an exciting perspective, topological photonics can be combined with optical nonlinearities, leading toward new collective phenomena and novel strongly correlated states of light, such as an analog of the fractional quantum Hall effect.