Dissipation-induced topological phase transition and periodic-driving-induced photonic topological state transfer in a small optomechanical lattice

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates how dissipation can induce a topological phase transition and enables topologically protected photonic state transfer in a small optomechanical lattice, revealing new ways to control topological states in quantum optical systems.

Contribution

It introduces a scheme to realize topological phase transitions and state transfer in a small optomechanical lattice, highlighting the role of cavity decay and periodic driving.

Findings

Dissipation induces a topological phase transition in the optomechanical lattice.

Topologically protected photonic state transfer is achievable via periodic driving.

The optomechanical lattice maps to a nontrivial SSH model.

Abstract

We propose a scheme to investigate the topological phase transition and the topological state transfer based on the small optomechanical lattice under the realistic parameters regime. We find that the optomechanical lattice can be equivalent to a topologically nontrivial Su-Schrieffer-Heeger (SSH) model via designing the effective optomechanical coupling. Especially, the optomechanical lattice experiences the phase transition between topologically nontrivial SSH phase and topologically trivial SSH phase by controlling the decay of the cavity field and the optomechanical coupling. We stress that the topological phase transition is mainly induced by the decay of the cavity field, which is counter-intuitive since the dissipation is usually detrimental to the system. Also, we investigate the photonic state transfer between the two cavity fields via the topologically protected edge channel based on the small optomechanical lattice. We find that the quantum state transfer assisted by the topological zero energy mode can be achieved via implying the external lasers with the periodical driving amplitudes into the cavity fields. Our scheme provides the fundamental and the insightful explanations toward the mapping of the photonic topological insulator based on the micro-nano optomechanical quantum optical platform.