Abstract
Photonic lattices—arrays of optical waveguides—are powerful platforms for simulating a range of phenomena, including topological phases. While probing dynamics is possible in these systems, by reinterpreting the propagation direction as time, accessing long timescales constitutes a severe experimental challenge. Here, we overcome this limitation by placing the photonic lattice in a cavity, which allows the optical state to evolve through the lattice multiple times. The accompanying detection method, which exploits a multi-pixel single-photon detector array, offers quasi-real time-resolved measurements after each round trip. We apply the state-recycling scheme to intriguing photonic lattices emulating Dirac fermions and Floquet topological phases. We also realise a synthetic pulsed electric field, which can be used to drive transport within photonic lattices. This work opens an exciting route towards the detection of long timescale effects in engineered photonic lattices and the realisation of hybrid analogue-digital simulators.
Highlights
Photonic lattices—arrays of optical waveguides—are powerful platforms for simulating a range of phenomena, including topological phases
Building lattices for light has in particular allowed for the engineering of topological phases that have remained inaccessible in solid-state devices, such as Floquet topological phases[4,5,6,7], and has offered novel methods by which the geometry and topology of Bloch bands can be directly extracted[8,9,10]
In current photonic lattice simulators, unlike fibre networks[17], the effective time-evolution of a specific input state is measured over relatively short timescales, which are set by the maximum propagation distance L ≈ 10 cm of the fabricated lattices
Summary
Photonic lattices—arrays of optical waveguides—are powerful platforms for simulating a range of phenomena, including topological phases. While probing dynamics is possible in these systems, by reinterpreting the propagation direction as time, accessing long timescales constitutes a severe experimental challenge We overcome this limitation by placing the photonic lattice in a cavity, which allows the optical state to evolve through the lattice multiple times. In current photonic lattice simulators, unlike fibre networks[17], the effective time-evolution of a specific input state is measured over relatively short timescales, which are set by the maximum propagation distance L ≈ 10 cm of the fabricated lattices This approach complicates, or even prevents, the observation of physical phenomena that are associated with slow dynamics, such as those emanating from weak effective inter-particle interactions[18,19] or weakly dispersive bands[20]. The output state could be finely modified after each round-trip, offering the possibility of engineering quantum walks, local dissipation, gauge fields and effective interaction effects in a (quasi-real-time) stroboscopic manner
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