Unique Huygens-Fresnel electromagnetic transportation of chiral Dirac wavelet in topological photonic crystal

Light propagates in various ways depending on environment, including uniform medium, surface/interface and photonic crystals, which appears ubiquitously in daily life and has been exploited for advanced optics technology. We unveiled that a topological photonic crystal exhibits unique electromagnetic (EM) transport properties originating from the Dirac frequency dispersion and multicomponent spinor eigenmodes. Measuring precisely local Poynting vectors in microstrips of honeycomb structure where optics topology emerges upon a band gap opening in the Dirac dispersion and a p-d band inversion induced by a Kekule-type distortion respecting C-6v symmetry, we showed that a chiral wavelet induces a global EM transportation circulating in the direction counter to the source, which is intimately related to the topological band gap specified by a negative Dirac mass. This brand-new Huygens-Fresnel phenomenon can be considered as the counterpart of negative refraction of EM plane waves associated with upwardly convex dispersions of photonic crystals, and our present finding is expected to open a new window for photonic innovations. Huygens-Fresnel features are useful for harnessing light in unique ways. Here the authors demonstrate a chiral light source that induces globally a counter energy flow in a topological photonics structure with Dirac-type frequency dispersion.

Automated summary

We revealed the unique electromagnetic transport properties of a topological photonic crystal, which is originated from the Dirac frequency dispersion and multicomponent spinor eigenmodes. By precisely measuring the local Poynting vectors in microstrips of honeycomb structure, we showed that a chiral wavelet induces a global electromagnetic transportation circulating in the direction counter to the source, which is intimately related to the topological band gap specified by a negative Dirac mass. This brand-new Huygens-Fresnel phenomenon can be considered as the counterpart of negative refraction of electromagnetic plane waves associated with upwardly convex dispersions of photonic crystals, and our present finding is expected to open a new window for photonic innovations.