Gap-dependent mass of a photon in a photonic topological insulator

Abstract

By using an analogy with axionic like systems, we study light propagation in periodic photonic topological insulator (PTI). The main result of this paper is an explicit expression for the PTI band structure. More specifically, it was found that for nonzero values of the topological phase difference $\gamma=\theta_2-\theta_1$ a finite gap $\delta \propto\gamma^2$ opens in the spectrum which is equivalent to appearance of nonzero effective photon mass $m^{*}(\delta)\propto \frac{\sqrt{\delta}}{\delta +2}$.