Multiple Brillouin Zone Winding of Topological Chiral Edge States for Slow Light Applications
Fujia Chen, Haoran Xue, Yuang Pan, Maoren Wang, Yuanhang Hu, Li Zhang, Qiaolu Chen, Song Han, Gui‐Geng Liu, Zhen Gao, Peiheng Zhou, Wen‐Yan Yin, Hongsheng Chen, Baile Zhang, Yihao Yang
Abstract
Photonic Chern insulators are known for their topological chiral edge states (CESs), whose absolute existence is determined by the bulk band topology, but concrete dispersion can be engineered to exhibit various properties. For example, the previous theory suggested that the edge dispersion can wind many times around the Brillouin zone to slow down light, which can potentially overcome fundamental limitations in conventional slow-light devices: narrow bandwidth and keen sensitivity to fabrication imperfection. Here, we report the first experimental demonstration of this idea, achieved by coupling CESs with resonance-induced nearly flat bands. We show that the backscattering-immune hybridized CESs are significantly slowed down over a relatively broad bandwidth. Our work thus paves an avenue to broadband topological slow-light devices.