Photonic Weyl phase transition in dynamically modulated brick-wall waveguide arrays

Abstract

We investigate the topological phase transition between Type-I and Type-II Weyl points (WPs) in a composite three-dimensional lattice composed of a two-dimensional brick-wall waveguide array and a synthetic frequency dimension created by dynamic modulation. By imposing different modulation amplitudes and phases in the two sublattices, we can break either parity or time-reversal symmetry and realize the phase transition between Type-I and Type-II WPs. As the array is truncated to have two edges, two Fermi-arc surface states will emerge, which propagate in opposite directions for Type-I WPs while in same directions for Type-II WPs, accompanied by bidirectional and unidirectional frequency shifts for the optical modes. Particularly at the phase transition point, we find that one of two bands becomes flat with a vanished group velocity along frequency axis in the vicinity of WPs. The study paves a way towards realizing different topological phases in the same photonic structure, which offers new opportunities to control wave transportation both in spatial and frequency domains.