Higher-order topological biphoton corner states in two-dimensional photonic lattices

Higher-order topological insulators have attracted great interest for their unconventional bulk-boundary correspondence especially gapless corner states. Here, we realize topological biphoton corner states in two-dimensional lattices. In addition to the striking state localization, the correlations in topologically nontrivial cases are more than 60 times higher than those in trivial cases and the visibility of Hong-Ou-Mandel interference for output topological corner-entangled states is higher than 90.3%. We confirm that the second-order photonic topological insulators support stable biphoton states that can maintain spatial distributions in high-dimensional Hilbert space, which have potential applications in quantum algorithms, simulation, and computation.

Automated summary

Researchers have achieved second-order photonic topological insulators in two-dimensional lattices, exhibiting high correlations and visibility, with potential applications in quantum algorithms, simulation, and computation.