Bloch Siegert Physics in a Reconfigurable Photonic Binary Lattice

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates the first experimental realization of Bloch Siegert physics in a reconfigurable photonic lattice, revealing extreme resonance sensitivity and enabling high-fidelity unidirectional transport.

Contribution

It introduces a programmable photonic lattice platform to observe and control Bloch Siegert effects and Floquet-engineered transport phenomena.

Findings

Observed coherent jumps across four resonance orders.

Verified the period law over the full parameter space.

Achieved high-fidelity unidirectional transport exceeding 0.98.

Abstract

The Bloch Siegert shift, a hallmark correction arising from counter-rotating interactions in driven two-level systems, has an exact counterpart in binary lattices under static forcing, where it governs resonant long-range tunneling between sites separated by odd lattice spacings. Here we report the first experimental realization of this correspondence using a 12 mode programmable photonic integrated circuit. By implementing a reconfigurable binary lattice with sub-percent control of on-site detuning, we observe coherent periodic jumps across four resonance orders and quantitatively verify the predicted period law over the full parameter space. The measured dynamics exhibit the extreme resonance sensitivity characteristic of Bloch Siegert physics and agree closely with the level-anticrossing picture of the semiclassical Rabi model. Exploiting the underlying parity structure, we further convert intrinsically bidirectional oscillations into cascaded unidirectional transport through adaptive sign reversal of the staggered potential, achieving fidelities exceeding 0.95 and 0.98 on the same hardware platform. Our results establish programmable photonic lattices as a scalable testbed for strongly driven quantum-optical phenomena and Floquet-engineered transport.