Polarization-Controlled Chiral Transport

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates a method to control chiral transport on-chip using incident polarization, enabling reconfigurable and high-capacity devices by mapping polarization states onto engineered waveguides.

Contribution

It introduces a polarization-dependent control mechanism for chiral transport, allowing dynamic modulation of output modes in integrated photonic devices.

Findings

Experimental demonstration of polarization-controlled modal outputs

Mapping TE and TM polarizations onto engineered waveguides

Reconfigurable chiral transport enabling high-capacity devices

Abstract

Handedness-selective chiral transport is an intriguing phenomenon that not only holds significant importance for fundamental research, but it also carries application prospects in fields such as optical communications and sensing. Currently, on-chip chiral transport devices are static, unable to modulate the output modes based on the input modes. This limits both device functionality reconfiguration and information transmission capacity. Here, we propose to use the incident polarization diversity to control the Hamiltonian evolution path, achieving polarization-dependent chiral transport. By mapping the evolution path of TE and TM polarizations onto elaborately engineered double-coupled waveguides, we experimentally demonstrate that different polarizations yield controllable modal outputs. This work combines Multiple-Input Multiple-Output and polarization diversity concepts with chiral transport, and challenges the prevailing notion that the modal outputs are fixed to specific modes in chiral transport, thereby opening pathways for the development of on-chip reconfigurable and high-capacity handedness-selective devices.