Wireless power transfer via topological modes in dimer chains

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates experimentally that topological edge modes in a photonic dimer chain can enable long-range wireless power transfer with high efficiency, leveraging the immunity of these modes to disorder and proposing advanced PT-symmetric systems for improved performance.

Contribution

It verifies the use of topological edge modes in a photonic dimer chain for efficient wireless power transfer and introduces a PT-symmetric system to address technical challenges.

Findings

Topological edge modes enable high-efficiency wireless power transfer.

Edge modes are immune to disorder perturbations.

Proposed PT-symmetric systems improve system robustness.

Abstract

The topological characteristics, including invariant topological orders, band inversion, and the topological edge mode (TEM) in the photonic insulators, have been widely studied. Whether people can take advantage of intriguing topological modes in simple one-dimensional systems to implement some practical applications is an issue which people are increasingly concerned about. In this work, based on a photonic dimer chain composed of ultra-subwavelength resonators, we verify experimentally that the TEM in the effective second-order parity-time (PT) system is immune to the inner disorder perturbation, and can be used to realize the long-range wireless power transfer (WPT) with high transmission efficiency. To intuitively show the TEM can be used for WPT, a power signal source is used to excite the TEM. It can be clearly seen that two LED lamps with 0.5-W at both ends of the structure are lighted up with the aid of TEMs. In addition, in order to solve the special technical problems of standby power loss and frequency tracking, we further propose that a WPT system with effective third-order PT symmetry can be constructed by using one topological interface mode and two TEMs. Inspired by the long-range WPT with TEMs in this work, it is expected to use more complex topological structures to achieve energy transmission with more functions, such as the WPT devices whose direction can be selected flexibly in the quasiperiodic or trimer topological chains.