EventDetails

Speaker:
Prof. Dr. Florian Marquardt, MPL & Universität Erlangen

Optomechanics, the interaction between light and vibrations, can be used to engineer topological transport of both photons and phonons. In this talk, I will describe our theoretical ideas in this field. There are two options: (i) One explicitly breaks time-reversal invariance with the help of the optomechanical interaction and a suitably engineered light field, creating a Chern insulator. (ii) Time-reversal invariance is preserved, but a suitably designed phononic crystal gives rise to helical edge channels. Time permitting, I will also explain our recent work on dynamical gauge fields in optomechanical arrays, where the effective magnetic field acting on photons becomes a dynamical degree of freedom.

References

[1] V. Peano, C.Brendel, M. Schmidt, and F. Marquardt, “Topological Phases of Sound and Light, Phys.

     Rev. X 5, 031011 (2015)

[2] C. Brendel, V. Peano, O. Painter, and F. Marquardt, “Pseudomagnetic fields for sound at the

     nanoscale,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) 114, E3390-E3395 (2017)

[3] C. Brendel, V. Peano, O. Painter, and F. Marquardt, “Snowflake phononic topological insulator at the nanoscale,” Phys. Rev. B 97, 020102 (R) (2018)