Skyrmionic Polarization Textures in Structured Dielectric Planar Media

TL;DR

This paper shows that structured dielectric devices can produce skyrmionic polarization textures, linking them to topological physics like Chern insulators.

Contribution

The novel contribution is demonstrating that skyrmionic textures can arise from the optical response of metasurfaces, not just from field structures or materials.

Findings

Skyrmionic textures emerge in polarization eigenstates of structured dielectric devices.

These textures correspond to topologically nontrivial bands akin to Chern insulators.

Local observables like Berry curvature and quantum metric are extracted from the system.

Abstract

Skyrmionic patterns of optical fields have recently emerged across diverse photonic platforms. Here, we show that such textures also arise in the polarization eigenstates of light propagation through flat dielectric devices with an engineered, space‐dependent optic axis orientation. We focus on two‐dimensional periodic structures, where propagation through multiple devices maps onto quantum dynamics on a synthetic optical lattice. Adopting the condensed‐matter framework, a spatial period defines an effective Brillouin zone, and polarization eigenstates can be grouped in two bands, with the role of energy played by the opposite phase delay. When such eigenstates exhibit skyrmionic textures, the corresponding lattice model shows the topology of a Chern insulator. We validate these concepts in a system of three tunable liquid‐crystal metasurfaces. Using machine learning, polarization eigenmodes are reconstructed over one spatial period. We identify configurations of the devices' parameters that lead to topologically nontrivial bands, where we directly observe skyrmionic eigenpolarization textures. We also extract local observables of lattice models, such as the Berry curvature and the quantum metric. We finally report a numerical simulation of an all‐optical quantum Hall effect emerging when light propagates through a sequence of such devices, arranged to mimic the effect of an external force on the lattice.

Topological skyrmionic textures are typically associated with the structure of optical fields. This work demonstrates that they can also emerge from the optical response of structured metasurfaces. Through engineered light–matter interaction, polarization eigenstates acquire nontrivial topology, which can be mapped into the Chern‐insulator physics, without requiring topological fields or topological material structures.

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