Topological Insulator Metamaterials

TL;DR

This review explores how topological insulator metamaterials enable novel light-matter interactions, combining topological electronic features with photonic applications across the spectrum, and discusses their dynamic control and technological potential.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive survey of topological material classes in photonics, highlighting recent advances in fabrication, exotic optical phenomena, and dynamic control methods in topological metamaterials.

Findings

Exotic electronic features lead to unconventional optical effects.

Topological metamaterials can be dynamically controlled by external fields.

Potential to bridge nanophotonics, electronics, and spintronics.

Abstract

Confinement of electromagnetic fields at the subwavelength scale via metamaterial paradigms is an established method to engineer light-matter interaction in most common material systems, from insulators to semiconductors, from metals to superconductors. In recent years, this approach has been extended to the realm of topological materials, providing a new avenue to access nontrivial features of their electronic band structure. In this review, we survey various topological material classes from a photonics standpoint, including crystal growth and lithographic structuring methods. We discuss how exotic electronic features such as spin-selective Dirac plasmon polaritons in topological insulators or hyperbolic plasmon polaritons in Weyl semimetals may give rise to unconventional magneto-optic, non-linear and circular photogalvanic effects in metamaterials across the visible to infrared spectrum. Finally, we dwell on how these effects may be dynamically controlled by applying external perturbations in the form of electric and magnetic fields or ultrafast optical pulses. Through these examples and future perspectives, we argue that topological insulator, semimetal and superconductor metamaterials are unique systems to bridge the missing links between nanophotonic, electronic and spintronic technologies.