TY - JOUR
T1 - Direct observation of photonic Landau levels and helical edge states in strained honeycomb lattices
AU - Jamadi, Omar
AU - Rozas, Elena
AU - Salerno, Grazia
AU - Milićević, Marijana
AU - Ozawa, Tomoki
AU - Sagnes, Isabelle
AU - Lemaître, Aristide
AU - Le Gratiet, Luc
AU - Harouri, Abdelmounaim
AU - Carusotto, Iacopo
AU - Bloch, Jacqueline
AU - Amo, Alberto
N1 - Funding Information:
This work was supported by the ERC grant Honeypol, the H2020-FETFLAG project PhoQus (820392), the QUANTERA project Interpol (ANR-QUAN-0003-05), the French National Research Agency project Quantum Fluids of Light (ANR-16-CE30-0021), the French government through the Programme Investissement d’Avenir (I-SITE ULNE/ANR-16-IDEX-0004 ULNE) managed by the Agence Nationale de la Recherche, the French RENATECH network, the Labex CEMPI (ANR-11-LABX-0007), the CPER Photonics for Society P4S and the Métropole Européenne de Lille (MEL) via the project TFlight. E.R. acknowledges financial support from FPI Scholarship No. BES-2015-074708. G.S. is supported by funding from the ERC Starting Grant TopoCold. T.O. is supported by JSPS KAKENHI Grant Number JP18H05857, JST PRESTO Grant Number JPMJPR19L2, JST CREST Grant Number JPMJCR19T1, the RIKEN Incentive Research Project, and the Interdisciplinary Theoretical and Mathematical Sciences Program (iTHEMS) at RIKEN.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2020, The Author(s).
PY - 2020/12/1
Y1 - 2020/12/1
N2 - We report the realization of a synthetic magnetic field for photons and polaritons in a honeycomb lattice of coupled semiconductor micropillars. A strong synthetic field is induced in both the s and p orbital bands by engineering a uniaxial hopping gradient in the lattice, giving rise to the formation of Landau levels at the Dirac points. We provide direct evidence of the sublattice symmetry breaking of the lowest-order Landau level wavefunction, a distinctive feature of synthetic magnetic fields. Our realization implements helical edge states in the gap between n = 0 and n = ±1 Landau levels, experimentally demonstrating a novel way of engineering propagating edge states in photonic lattices. In light of recent advances in the enhancement of polariton–polariton nonlinearities, the Landau levels reported here are promising for the study of the interplay between pseudomagnetism and interactions in a photonic system.
AB - We report the realization of a synthetic magnetic field for photons and polaritons in a honeycomb lattice of coupled semiconductor micropillars. A strong synthetic field is induced in both the s and p orbital bands by engineering a uniaxial hopping gradient in the lattice, giving rise to the formation of Landau levels at the Dirac points. We provide direct evidence of the sublattice symmetry breaking of the lowest-order Landau level wavefunction, a distinctive feature of synthetic magnetic fields. Our realization implements helical edge states in the gap between n = 0 and n = ±1 Landau levels, experimentally demonstrating a novel way of engineering propagating edge states in photonic lattices. In light of recent advances in the enhancement of polariton–polariton nonlinearities, the Landau levels reported here are promising for the study of the interplay between pseudomagnetism and interactions in a photonic system.
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U2 - 10.1038/s41377-020-00377-6
DO - 10.1038/s41377-020-00377-6
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85089568711
SN - 2095-5545
VL - 9
JO - Light: Science and Applications
JF - Light: Science and Applications
IS - 1
M1 - 144
ER -