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In this new experiment Hafezi’s team modified their design to directly measure the value of the topology-related property that characterizes the photonic edge states. This measurement is analogous to characterizing the quantized conductance, which was critical to understanding the electron quantum Hall effect. In photonics, however, conductance is not relevant as it pertains to electron-like behavior. Here the significant feature is the winding number, which is related to how light circulates around the chip. Its value equals to the number of available edge states and should not change in the face of certain disruptions.
To extract the winding number, the team adds 100 nanometer titanium heaters on a layer above the waveguides. Heat changes the index of refraction, namely how the light bends as it passes through the waveguides. In this manner, researchers can controllably imprint a phase shift onto the light. Phase can be thought of in terms of a time delay. For instance, when comparing two light waves, the intensity can be the same, but one wave may be shifted in time compared to the other. The two waves overlap when one wave is delayed by a full oscillation cycle—this is called a 2π phase shift.
On the chip, enough heat is added to add a 2π phase shift to the light. The researchers observe an energy shift in the transmission stripes corresponding to light traveling along the edge. Notably, in this chip design, the light can circulate either clockwise (CW) or counterclockwise (CCW), and the two travel pathways do not behave the same (in contrast to an interferometer). When the phase shift is introduced, the CW traveling light hops one direction in the transmission spectrum, and the CCW goes the opposite way. The winding number is the amount that these edge-state spectral features move and is exactly equivalent to the quantized jumps in the electronic conductance.
Sunil Mittal, lead author and postdoctoral researcher explains one future direction, “So far, our research has been focused on transporting classical [non-quantum] properties of light--mainly the power transmission. It is intriguing to further investigate if this topological system can also achieve robust transport of quantum information, which will have potential applications for on-chip quantum information processing.”
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