Optical soliton formation controlled by angle twisting in photonic moir\'e lattices

TL;DR

This paper investigates how twisting angles in photonic moiré lattices influence optical soliton formation, revealing new insights into flat-band physics and the transition from periodic to aperiodic geometries in nonlinear media.

Contribution

It demonstrates the control of optical soliton formation through geometrical manipulation of photonic moiré lattices, highlighting the role of twisting angles in nonlinear optical phenomena.

Findings

Solitons form in lattices transitioning from periodic to aperiodic geometries.

Threshold properties of solitons reflect flat-band physics.

Optical control is achieved via twisting angles in photorefractive media.

Abstract

Exploration of the impact of synthetic material landscapes featuring tunable geometrical properties on physical processes is a research direction that is currently of great interest because of the outstanding phenomena that are continually being uncovered. Twistronics and the properties of wave excitations in moir\'e lattices are salient examples. Moir\'e patterns bridge the gap between aperiodic structures and perfect crystals, thus opening the door to the exploration of effects accompanying the transition from commensurate to incommensurate phases. Moir\'e patterns have revealed profound effects in graphene-based systems1,2,3,4,5, they are used to manipulate ultracold atoms6,7 and to create gauge potentials8, and are observed in colloidal clusters9. Recently, it was shown that photonic moir\'e lattices enable observation of the two-dimensional localization-to-delocalization transition of light in purely linear systems10,11. Here, we employ moir\'e lattices optically induced in photorefractive nonlinear media12,13,14 to elucidate the formation of optical solitons under different geometrical conditions controlled by the twisting angle between the constitutive sublattices. We observe the formation of solitons in lattices that smoothly transition from fully periodic geometries to aperiodic ones, with threshold properties that are a pristine direct manifestation of flat-band physics11.