Photonic p-orbital higher-order topological insulators

Autor: Yahui Zhang, Domenico Bongiovanni, Ziteng Wang, Xiangdong Wang, Shiqi Xia, Zhichan Hu, Daohong Song, Dario Jukić, Jingjun Xu, Roberto Morandotti, Hrvoje Buljan, Zhigang Chen
Rok vydání: 2022
Předmět:
DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2208.05961
Popis: The orbital degrees of freedom play a pivotal role in understanding fundamental phenomena in solid-state materials as well as exotic quantum states of matter including orbital superfluidity and topological semimetals. Despite tremendous efforts in engineering synthetic cold-atom, electronic and photonic lattices to explore orbital physics, thus far high orbitals in an important class of materials, namely, the higher-order topological insulators (HOTIs), have not been realized. Here, we demonstrate p-orbital corner states in a photonic HOTI, unveiling their underlying topological invariant, symmetry protection, and nonlinearity-induced dynamical rotation. In a Kagome-type HOTI, we find that topological protection of the p-orbital corner states demands an orbital-hopping symmetry, in addition to the generalized chiral symmetry. Due to orbital hybridization, the nontrivial topology of the p-orbital HOTI is hidden if bulk polarization is used as the topological invariant, but well manifested by the generalized winding number. Our work opens a pathway for the exploration of intriguing orbital phenomena mediated by higher band topology applicable to a broad spectrum of systems.
Comment: 11 pages, 4 figures
Databáze: OpenAIRE