Metamaterials for topological photonics

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• Shuang Zhang (Birmingham)
• Friday 06 October 2017, 12:00-13:00
• Physics East 217.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Dr Giovanni Barontini.

Metamaterials have attracted tremendous attention due to their exotic optical properties and functionalities that are not attainable from naturally occurring materials. In particular, metamaterials can be designed to introduce strong spin-orbit coupling for light. In this talk, I will start with a brief introduction to the concepts of Berry curvature and topological photonics. I will show that combination of chirality [1, 2] and hyperbolicity – an extreme form of anisotropy [3], can result in nontrivial topological orders in metamaterials and consequently topologically protected photonic surface states that are immune from scattering by defects and sharp edges [4, 5]. I will finally show the experimental observation of photonic ‘Fermi arcs’ in the microwave regime [6].

1. A. V. Rogacheva, V. A. Fedotov, A. S. Schwanecke, and N. I. Zheludev, Phys. Rev. Lett. 97, 177401 (2006).

2. S. Zhang, Y.-S. Park, J. Li, X. Lu, W. Zhang, and X. Zhang, Phys. Rev. Lett. 102, 023901 (2009).

3. J. Yao, Z. Liu, Y. Liu, Y. Wang, C. Sun, G. Bartal, A. M. Stacy, and X. Zhang, Science 321, 930 (2008).

4. W Gao, M Lawrence, B Yang, F Liu, F Fang, B B éri, J Li, and S Zhang, Physical Review Letters, 114, 037402 (2015)

5. W Gao, B Yang, M Lawrence, F Fang, B B éri, S Zhang, “Photonic Weyl degeneracies in magnetized plasma”, Nature Communications, 7, 12435 (2016)

6. B Yang, Q Guo, B Tremain, LE Barr, W Gao, H Liu, B B éri, Y Xiang, D Fan, AP Hibbins & S Zhang, “Direct observation of topological surface-state arcs in photonic metamaterials”, Nature Communications, 8, 97 (2017)

This talk is part of the Cold atoms series.

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• Cold atoms
• Physics East 217

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