We map the topological properties of a one dimensional superlattice to the optical properties of an electronic system. We find that the nonlinear-optical response is optimized for electrons that live in the transitional morphology between topologically protected edge states and delocalized eigenstates. This provides a novel means of tuning the nonlinear-optical response of hybrid quantum systems. We show how these characteristics can be used to mimic saturable absorption and illustrate how `quantum cords' can be used to build an efficient all-optical switch.
Topological photonics provides a robust framework for strategically controlling light confinement and propagation dynamics. By exploiting the marriage between this notion and symmetry-constrained mode competition in an active setting, we experimentally demonstrate, for the first time, a hybrid silicon microlaser structure supporting a topologically protected zero-mode lasing. This mode is distributed over an integrated array of optical microrings, each supporting multiple modes that compete for gain. However, the mode competition is diminished in favor of a pre-defined topological state, which…
We theoretically investigate the analog of electromagnetically induced transparency, absorption and parametric amplification in a hybrid opto-electromechanical system consisting of an optical cavity and a microwave cavity coupled to a common nanomechanical resonator. When the two cavity modes are driven on their respective red sidebands by two pump beams and a probe beam is applied to the optical cavity to monitor the optical response of the hybrid system, we find that a transparency window appears in the probe transmission spectrum due to destructive interference. When the optical cavity is p…
A generalized family of scalar structured Gaussian modes including helical-Ince--Gaussian (HIG) and Hermite--Laguerre--Gaussian (HLG) beams is presented with physical insight upon a hybrid topological evolution nature of multi-singularity vortex beams carrying orbital angular momentum (OAM). Considering the physical origins of intrinsic coordinates aberration and the Gouy phase shift, a closed-form expression is derived to characterize the general modes in astigmatic optical systems. Moreover, a graphical representation, Singularities Hybrid Evolution Nature (SHEN) sphere, is proposed to visua…
We create hybrid topological-photonic localisation of light by introducing concepts from the field of topological matter to that of photonic crystal fiber arrays. S-polarized obliquely propagating electromagnetic waves are guided by hexagonal, and square, lattice topological systems along an array of infinitely conducting fibers. The theory utilises perfectly periodic arrays that, in frequency space, have gapped Dirac cones producing band gaps demarcated by pronounced valleys locally imbued with a nonzero local topological quantity. These broken symmetry-induced stop-bands allow for localised …
We study the interaction between a topological insulator nanoparticle and a quantum dot subject to an applied electric field. The electromagnetic response of the topological insulator is derived from axion electrodynamics in the quasistatic approximation. Localized modes are quantized in terms of dipolar bosonic modes, which couples dipolarly to the quantum dot. Hence, we treat the hybrid as a two-level system interacting with a single bosonic mode, where the coupling strength encodes the information concerning the nontrivial topology of the nanoparticle. The interaction of the hybrid with the…
The geometric phase and topological property for one-dimensional hybrid plasmonic-photonic crystals consisting of a simple lattice of graphene sheets are investigated systematically. For transverse magnetic waves, both plasmonic and photonic modes exist in the momentum space. The accidental degeneracy point of these two kinds of modes is identified to be a diabolic point accompanied with a topological phase transition. For a closed loop around this degeneracy point, the Berry phase is Pi as a consequence of the discontinuous jump of the geometric Zak phase. The wave impedance is calculated ana…
Non-Hermitian skin effect (NHSE) in non-Hermitian lattice systems, associated with a point gap on the complex energy plane, has attracted great theoretical and experimental interest. Much less is studied on the so-called second-order non-Hermitian skin effect, where the bulk does not support a point gap but localization at the corner still occurs. This work discovers a class of hybrid skin-topological modes as the second-order non-Hermitian skin effect without asymmetric couplings. Specifically, by only adding gain/loss to two-dimensional Chern insulators and so long as the gain/loss strength …
We investigated theoretically the exciton-plasmon coupling effects on the population dynamics and the absorption properties of a hybrid nanosystem composed of a metal nanoparticle (MNP) and a V-type three level semiconductor quantum dot (SQD), which are created by the interaction with the induced dipole moments in the SQD and the MNP, respectively. Excitons of the SQD and the plasmons of the MNP in such a hybrid nanosystem could be coupled strongly or weakly to demonstrate novel properties of the hybrid system. Our results show that the nonlinear optical response of the hybrid nanosystem can b…
Topology is central to understanding and engineering materials that display robust physical phenomena immune to imperfections. Different topological phases of matter are characterised by topological invariants. In energy-conserving (Hermitian) systems, these invariants are determined by the winding of eigenstates in momentum space. In non-Hermitian systems, a novel topological invariant is predicted to emerge from the winding of the complex eigenenergies. Here, we directly measure the non-Hermitian topological invariant arising from exceptional points in the momentum-resolved spectrum of excit…
Understanding the interaction between plasmonic nanoparticles and transparent conductive oxides is instrumental to the development of next-generation photovoltaic, opto-electronic and energy-efficient solid-state lighting devices. We investigated the optical response of hybrid media composed of gold nanoparticles deposited on aluminum-doped zinc oxide thin films with varying doping concentration by spectroscopic ellipsometry. The dielectric functions of bare AZO were addressed first, revealing doping-induced effects such as the band-gap shift and the appearance of free carriers. In the hybrid …
We present an exact rewriting of the Mie coefficients describing the scattering of light by a spherical core-shell particle which enables their interpretation in terms of an hybridization of the two surface modes arising, respectively, at the core-shell and the shell-medium interface. For this particular case we thus obtain from the Mie theory--analytically for all multipole orders and hence for arbitrarily sized particles--the hybridization scenario, which so far has been employed primarily for small particles in the electrostatic approximation. To demonstrate the strength of the rewriting ap…
The optical response of an artificial hybrid molecule system composed of two metallic nanoparticles (MNPs) and a semiconductor quantum dot (SQD) is investigated theoretically due to the plasmon-exciton-plasmon coupling effects on the absorption properties of the hybrid nanosystem, which depends on the interaction between the induced dipole moments in the SQD and the MNPs, respectively. We show that the strong coupling of exciton and localized surface plasmons in such a hybrid molecules leads to appealing, tunable optical properties by adjusting the symmetry of the hybrid molecule nanosystem wi…
Rapid development of topological concepts in photonics unveils exotic phenomena such as unidirectional propagation of electromagnetic waves resilient to backscattering at sharp bends and disorder-immune localization of light at stable frequencies. Recently introduced higher-order topological insulators (HOTIs) bring in additional degrees of control over light confinement and steering. However, designs of photonic HOTIs reported so far are solely exploiting lattice geometries which are hard to reconfigure thus limiting tunability. Here, we elaborate a conceptually new mechanism to engineer high…
Topological edge states form at the edges of periodic materials with specific degeneracies in their modal spectra, such as Dirac points, under the action of effects breaking certain symmetries of the system. In particular, in Floquet topological insulators unidirectional edge states appear upon breakup of the effective time-reversal symmetry due to dynamical modulations of the underlying lattice potential. However, such states are usually reported for certain simple lattice terminations, for example, at zigzag or bearded edges in honeycomb lattices. Here we show that unconventional topological…
