Abstract
Systems supporting Weyl points have gained increasing attention in condensed physics, photonics and acoustics due to their rich physics, such as Fermi arcs and chiral anomalies. Acting as sources or drains of Berry curvature, Weyl points exhibit a singularity of the Berry curvature at their core. It is, therefore, expected that the induced effect of the Berry curvature can be dramatically enhanced in systems supporting Weyl points. In this work, we construct synthetic Weyl points in a photonic crystal that consists of a honeycomb array of coupled rods with slowly varying radii along the direction of propagation. The system possesses photonic Weyl points in the synthetic space of two momenta plus an additional physical parameter with an enhanced Hall effect resulting from the large Berry curvature in the vicinity of the Weyl point. Interestingly, a helical Zitterbewegung (ZB) is observed when the wave packet traverses very close to a Weyl point, which is attributed to the contribution of the non-Abelian Berry connection arising from the near degenerate eigenstates.
Highlights
Similar to electrons in solid state materials[1], an optical beam obliquely incident to an interface between two transparent media experiences a spin-dependent transverse shift in the centre of energy of the reflected/ refracted beam
A wave packet propagating in the z direction experiences a variant η and, a zdependent Berry curvature generated by the synthetic Weyl points
Since each Weyl point is a monopole of the Berry curvature in the momentum space, it is expected that a relatively large Hall effect should be observed in its vicinity
Summary
Similar to electrons in solid state materials[1], an optical beam obliquely incident to an interface between two transparent media experiences a spin-dependent transverse shift in the centre of energy (mass) of the reflected/ refracted beam. This particular shift is called the spin Hall effect of light (SHEL), which results from the spin−orbit interactions (SOI) or spin−orbit coupling of photons[2,3,4,5]. In a staggered graphene analogue with time-reversal symmetry[14,15], breaking inversion symmetry can induce SOI and allow a valley Hall effect of photons[15]. Due to the time-reversal symmetry, there is an opposite transverse shift of the incident optical beam when the in-plane
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