Ultrawide Edge State Supercontinuum in a Floquet-Lieb Topological Photonic Insulator

TL;DR

This paper introduces a Floquet-Lieb topological photonic insulator with all flat bands supporting continuous, ultrawide edge mode transmission, demonstrating robustness against disorder and potential for advanced photonic applications.

Contribution

It presents the first Floquet-Lieb topological insulator with flat bands enabling supercontinuum edge states, realized in 2D microring resonator lattices, with demonstrated robustness and broad bandwidths.

Findings

Edge mode supercontinuum spans over three microring free spectral ranges.

Edge states remain robust despite fabrication-induced lattice disorder.

Flat bands are immune to large on-site potential variations.

Abstract

Conventional topological photonic insulators typically have narrow nontrivial band gaps truncated by broad dispersive bulk bands, resulting in limited edge mode transmission bandwidths that can be exploited for potential applications. Here we propose and demonstrate the first Floquet-Lieb topological photonic insulator with all flat bands which can support continuous edge mode transmission across multiple Floquet-Brillouin zones. This supercontinuum of edge states results from the orthogonality between the flat-band modes and the edge states, allowing for continuous excitation of the latter without scattering into the bulk modes. Moreover, we show that these flat bands are perfectly immune to random variations in the on-site potential, regardless of how large the perturbations are, thus ensuring complete robustness of the edge modes to this type of disorder. We realized Floquet-Lieb insulators using 2D microring resonator lattices with perfect nearest-neighbor couplings. Transmission measurements and direct imaging of the scattered light distributions showed an edge mode supercontinuum spanning more than three microring free spectral ranges. These broad edge mode transmission bands persisted even in the presence of lattice disorder caused by fabrication imperfection. The proposed Floquet-Lieb insulator can potentially be used to realize topological photonic devices with ultrawide bandwidths and super robustness for applications in integrated quantum photonics and programmable photonic circuits.