Observation of topologically distinct corner states in "bearded" photonic Kagome lattices

TL;DR

This paper experimentally demonstrates two types of topologically distinct corner states in photonic Kagome lattices with bearded edges, revealing their different topological origins and localization properties.

Contribution

It uncovers the existence of in-phase and out-of-phase corner states in breathing Kagome lattices, linking their properties to topological and trivial regimes, and provides experimental validation.

Findings

In-phase corner states exist only in topologically nontrivial regimes.

Out-of-phase corner states appear in both trivial and nontrivial regimes.

Both types of corner states are observed experimentally in photonic lattices.

Abstract

Kagome lattices represent an archetype of intriguing physics, attracting a great deal of interest in different branches of natural sciences, recently in the context of topological crystalline insulators. Here, we demonstrate two distinct classes of corner states in breathing Kagome lattices (BKLs) with "bearded" edge truncation, unveiling their topological origin. The in-phase corner states are found to exist only in the topologically nontrivial regime, characterized by a nonzero bulk polarization. In contrast, the out-of-phase corner states appear in both topologically trivial and nontrivial regimes, either as bound states in the continuum or as in-gap states depending on the lattice dimerization conditions. Furthermore, the out-of-phase corner states are highly localized, akin to flat-band compact localized states, and they manifest both real- and momentum-space topology. Experimentally, we observe both types of corner states in laser-written photonic bearded-edge BKLs, corroborated by numerical simulations. Our results not only deepen the current understanding of topological corner modes in BKLs, but also provide new insight into their physical origins, which may be applied to other topological BKL platforms beyond optics.