RUI: Edge States and Vortices in Photonic Graphene-Like Structures

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Ordinary optical materials (like eyeglasses) are manufactured to be highly uniform in their optical properties--irregularities are taken to be a sign of inferior quality. By precisely controlling the irregularites, however, and making them conform to a particular pattern, one can create intriguing and potentially useful effects that go beyond what is normal in uniform systems. This project will explore some such effects which may mimic the behavior of graphene--a material that has attracted a great deal of interest in recent years because of its potential application in future microelectronics manufacturing. This analog of graphene is easier to work with than real graphene, allowing more rapid progress in exploring the true limits of this fascinating material. The experimental techniques that will be used in this research are straightforward enough for active participation of undergraduate and masters-level graduate students, yet the research activities will expose students to a broad range of phenomena in a cutting-edge field of interdisciplinary science. In fact, throughout the project, a major emphasis will be placed on mentoring students, particularly those from the ethnically diverse San Francisco Bay Area population. Carbon-based graphene has been highly touted and tested as an extraordinary material for many applications, apart from elucidating fundamental physics phenomena. Recently, there is a surge of interest in creating "artificial" graphene systems not only for electrons, but also for atoms, photons, and other quasiparticles such as polaritons. This is simply because that artificial graphene can provide a tunable system to explore physical phenomena difficult or impossible to achieve in natural graphene. In this project, a simple optical induction technique will be used to create 2D honey-comb (graphene-like) lattices as well as other nonconventional lattice structures. More importantly, these photonic structures will be employed as a workbench for investigation some fundamental issues including surface states, vortices and equivalent spin effects and magnetic effects of light in graphene-like lattices. Although performed in a simple optical setting of reconfigurable photonic structures, much of the proposed work will have direct impacts on other areas of sciences, ranging from condensed matter physics to atomic physics such as Bose-Einstein condensates trapped in periodic potentials. For instance, the electronic edge states were known for decades, but such fundamental phenomena have recently attracted growing interest in optics that has led to the successful demonstration of photonic topological insulators. Indeed, there is much potential to use optical systems as photonic simulators for studying complex classical and quantum phenomena.