Non-reciprocal diplexer and power combiner/divider from topological cavities with both splitting and combining functions

Abstract

Multiplexers and power combiners/dividers are crucial in many applications of electromagnetic waves including microwave and terahertz communication. Full-duplex communication requires the separation of transmitted and received signals; thus, non-reciprocal multiplexers and power combiners/dividers are very essential. In this work, we present and numerically study a design concept for such non-reciprocal circuits from topological cavities. First, a quad-port circulator is made from a topological cavity and two trivial waveguides, which effectively operates as a non-reciprocal band-pass filter. Then, by parallelly connecting multiple circulators together, topological diplexers and power combiners/dividers are formed. These circuits are non-reciprocal due to the nature of photonic topological insulators, yet unlike the previously proposed non-reciprocal multiplexers or power combiners/dividers, they can both split and combine multiple frequencies or multiple power flows. The topological nature of the proposed circuits also makes them robust to any fabrication error and suitable for practical full-duplex communication applications.