Reprogrammable plasmonic topological insulators with ultrafast control

TL;DR

This paper introduces a reprogrammable plasmonic topological insulator capable of ultrafast, nanosecond-level switching of topological pathways, significantly advancing dynamic control in topological photonics.

Contribution

It presents the first ultrafast, electronically reprogrammable topological insulator platform with nanosecond switching, enabling dynamic and flexible topological photonic functionalities.

Findings

Topological propagation routes can be dynamically steered at nanosecond timescales.

Ultrafast electronic switches enable more than 10^7 times faster reprogramming.

The platform integrates multiple topological functionalities for agile photonic control.

Abstract

Topological photonics has revolutionized our understanding of light propagation, but most of current studies are focused on designing a static photonic structure. Developing a dynamic photonic topological platform to switch multiple topological functionalities at ultrafast speed is still a great challenge. Here we demonstrate an ultrafast reprogrammable plasmonic topological insulator, where the topological propagation route can be dynamically steered at nanosecond-level switching time, namely more than 10^7 times faster than the current state-of-the-art. This orders-of-magnitude improvement is achieved by using ultrafast electronic switches in an innovative way to implement the programmability. Due to the flexible programmability, many existing photonic topological functionalities can be integrated into this agile topological platform. Our work brings the current studies of photonic topological insulators to a digital and intelligent era, which could boost the development of intelligent and ultrafast photoelectric devices with built-in topological protection.