Non-Abelian Thouless pumping in photonic waveguides
Non-Abelian Thouless pumping in photonic waveguides
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DOI：
10.1038/s41567-022-01669-x
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发表时间：
2022-07-28
期刊：
影响因子：
19.6
通讯作者：
Sun, Hong-Bo
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Sun, Yi-Ke;Zhang, Xu-Lin;Sun, Hong-Bo
在简并平坦带的光子波导中已经观察到非阿贝尔索利斯抽运，其结果取决于抽运操作的顺序。索勒抽运使拓扑传输和拓扑不变量的直接测量成为可能。到目前为止，索利斯抽运的实现依赖于物理系统在非简并带之后的绝热演化，但有人预测，当简并带存在时，抽运在本质上可以变成非阿贝尔。由此产生的非阿贝尔规范场和相关的非交换运算将有希望用于与幺正矩阵相关的应用，例如光子量子逻辑。本文提出了在片上光子平台上实现非阿贝尔索利斯泵浦的实验方法。通过调制具有简并平坦带的光子波导内的耦合系数，我们在一个三步抽运装置中观察到非阿贝尔索利斯抽运，其结果取决于抽运操作的顺序。我们期望我们的多功能平台能够揭示更复杂的非阿贝尔拓扑物理，并在未来实现片上非阿贝尔光子器件。
Non-Abelian Thouless pumping, whose outcome depends on the order of pumping operations, has been observed in photonic waveguides with degenerate flat bands.Thouless pumping enables topological transport and the direct measurement of topological invariants. So far, realizations of Thouless pumping rely on the adiabatic evolution of a physical system following a non-degenerate band, but it has been predicted that pumping can become non-Abelian in nature when degenerate bands exist. The resulting non-Abelian gauge fields and associated non-commutative operations would be promising for applications related to unitary matrices, such as photonic quantum logic. Here we propose the experimental realization of non-Abelian Thouless pumping in an on-chip photonic platform. By modulating the coupling coefficients within photonic waveguides with degenerate flat bands, we observe non-Abelian Thouless pumping in a three-step pumping device where the outcomes depend on the sequence of the pumping operations. We anticipate our versatile platform to reveal more complex non-Abelian topological physics and realize on-chip non-Abelian photonic devices in the future.