Abstract
Manipulating the flow of light with unusual diffraction features has been enabled, during the last decades, by considering optical transport in structured photonic media. The analogy between solid-states physics and the light propagation in specifically engineered arrayed structures generally leads to gapped dispersion relations. More recently, photonics borrowed concepts from topological insulators (TIs) which possess topologically nontrivial gapped bandstructure [1]. For finite systems, the number of topologically protected states, localized at the interface, can be predicted by simply comparing the topological invariants associated to the bandstructures of each system. It was also proposed that topological states may arise, when a system is subjected to a non-adiabatic time-periodic potential. This concept of Floquet topological insulators, first developed in the context of irradiated semimetals and semi-conductors [2] found a spectacular experimental manifestation in out-of-equilibrium cold atom physics [3], single-photon quantum walks [4] and photonic lattices [5].
© 2017 IEEE
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