Tilted and type-III Dirac cones emerging from flat bands in photonic orbital graphene

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates the creation of tilted and type-III Dirac cones in photonic orbital graphene, revealing new topological and transport phenomena by engineering orbital degrees of freedom in photonic lattices.

Contribution

It introduces a novel photonic lattice platform with orbital degrees of freedom that hosts semi-Dirac, tilted, and type-III Dirac cones, including those emerging from flat bands.

Findings

Realization of tilted Dirac cones from flat bands in photonic lattices

Observation of type-III Dirac cones combining flat and linear dispersions

Potential for exploring unconventional transport and topological phenomena

Abstract

The extraordinary electronic properties of Dirac materials, the two-dimensional partners of Weyl semimetals, arise from the linear crossings in their band structure. When the dispersion around the Dirac points is tilted, the emergence of intricate transport phenomena has been predicted, such as modified Klein tunnelling, intrinsic anomalous Hall effects and ferrimagnetism. However, Dirac materials are rare, particularly with tilted Dirac cones. Recently, artificial materials whose building blocks present orbital degrees of freedom have appeared as promising candidates for the engineering of exotic Dirac dispersions. Here we take advantage of the orbital structure of photonic resonators arranged in a honeycomb lattice to implement photonic lattices with semi-Dirac, tilted and, most interestingly, type-III Dirac cones that combine flat and linear dispersions. The tilted cones emerge from the touching of a flat and a parabolic band with a non-trivial topological charge. These results open the way to the synthesis of orbital Dirac matter with unconventional transport properties and, in combination with polariton nonlinearities, to the study of topological and Dirac superfluids in photonic lattices.