Recent studies of disorder or non-Hermiticity induced topological insulators inject new ingredients for engineering topological matter. Here, we consider the effect of purely non-Hermitian disorders, a combination of these two ingredients, in a 1D coupled-cavity array with disordered gain and loss. Topological photonic states can be induced by increasing gain-loss disorder strength with topological invariants carried by localized states in the complex bulk spectra. The system showcases rich phase diagrams and distinct topological states from Hermitian disorders. The non-Hermitian critical behavior is characterized by the biorthogonal localization length of zero-energy edge modes, which diverges at the critical transition point and establishes the bulk-edge correspondence. Furthermore, we show that the bulk topology may be experimentally accessed by measuring the biorthogonal chiral displacement, which can be extracted from a proper Ramsey interferometer that works in both clean and disordered regions. The proposed coupled-cavity photonic setup relies on techniques that have been experimentally demonstrated and, thus, provides a feasible route toward exploring such non-Hermitian disorder driven topological insulators.
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21 August 2023
Research Article|
August 25 2023
Photonic topological insulators induced by non-Hermitian disorders in a coupled-cavity array
Special Collection:
Non-Hermitian Photonics
Xi-Wang Luo
;
Xi-Wang Luo
a)
(Conceptualization, Investigation, Writing – original draft)
1
Department of Physics, The University of Texas at Dallas
, Richardson, Texas 75080-3021, USA
2
CAS Key Laboratory of Quantum Information, University of Science and Technology of China
, Hefei 230026, China
a)Authors to whom correspondence should be addressed: luoxw@ustc.edu.cn and chuanwei.zhang@utdallas.edu
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Chuanwei Zhang
Chuanwei Zhang
a)
(Conceptualization, Investigation, Writing – review & editing)
1
Department of Physics, The University of Texas at Dallas
, Richardson, Texas 75080-3021, USA
a)Authors to whom correspondence should be addressed: luoxw@ustc.edu.cn and chuanwei.zhang@utdallas.edu
Search for other works by this author on:
a)Authors to whom correspondence should be addressed: luoxw@ustc.edu.cn and chuanwei.zhang@utdallas.edu
Appl. Phys. Lett. 123, 081111 (2023)
Article history
Received:
April 09 2023
Accepted:
August 12 2023
Citation
Xi-Wang Luo, Chuanwei Zhang; Photonic topological insulators induced by non-Hermitian disorders in a coupled-cavity array. Appl. Phys. Lett. 21 August 2023; 123 (8): 081111. https://doi.org/10.1063/5.0153523
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