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  • Letter
  • Open Access

Large-area quantum-spin-Hall waveguide states in a three-layer topological photonic crystal heterostructure

Zhihao Lan1, Menglin L. N. Chen2, Jian Wei You3, and Wei E. I. Sha4

  • 1Department of Electronic and Electrical Engineering, University College London, Torrington Place, London WC1E 7JE, United Kingdom
  • 2Department of Electronic and Information Engineering, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Kowloon, Hong Kong, China
  • 3State Key Laboratory of Milimeter Waves, Institute of Electromagnetic Space, Southeast University, Nanjing, China
  • 4Key Laboratory of Micro-nano Electronic Devices and Smart Systems of Zhejiang Province, College of Information Science and Electronic Engineering, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou 310027, China

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Phys. Rev. A 107, L041501 – Published 12 April, 2023

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevA.107.L041501

Abstract

Topological photonic edge states are conventionally formed at the interface between two domains of topologically trivial and nontrivial photonic crystals. Recent works exploiting photonic quantum Hall and quantum-valley-Hall effects have shown that large-area topological waveguide states could be created in a three-layer topological heterostructure that consists of a finite-width domain featuring a Dirac cone sandwiched between two domains of photonic crystals with opposite topological properties. In this Letter, we show that an alternative kind of large-area topological waveguide state could be created employing the photonic analogs of the quantum-spin-Hall effect. Taking the well-used Wu-Hu model in topological photonics as an example, we show that sandwiching a finite-width domain of photonic crystals featuring a double Dirac cone between two domains of expanded and shrunken unit cells could lead to the emergence of large-area topological helical waveguide states distributed uniformly in the middle domain. Importantly, we unveil a power-law scaling related to the size of the band gap within which the large-area helical states reside as a function of the width of the middle domain, which implies that these large-area modes in principle could exist in the middle domain with arbitrary width. Moreover, pseudospin-momentum-locking unidirectional propagations and the robustness of these large-area waveguide modes against sharp bends are explicitly demonstrated. Our work broadens the photonic systems and platforms that could be utilized for large-area-mode–enabled topological waveguiding.

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Information

Phys. Rev. A 107, L041501– Published 12 April, 2023
  • Received 17 October 2022
  • Accepted 24 March 2023
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Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article's title, journal citation, and DOI.

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