Topological protection of photonic path entanglement

Mikael C Rechtsman,Yonatan Plotnik,Yaakov Lumer,Mordechai Segev,Armando Perez-Leija,Alexander Szameit

doi:10.1364/optica.3.000925

Abstract

The recent advent of photonic topological insulators has opened the door to using the robustness of topologically protected transport—originated in the domain of condensed matter physics—in optical devices and in quantum simulation. Concurrently, quantum walks in photonic networks have been shown to yield exponential speedup for certain algorithms, such as Boson sampling. Here we theoretically demonstrate that photonic topological insulators can robustly protect the transport of quantum information through photonic networks, despite the presence of disorder.

Highlights

Photonic topological insulators (PTIs) were proposed [2,3] and realized in microwaves [4]
Other schemes were predicted for the optical regime [5–8], and realized in experiments using arrays of helical waveguides [9] and in resonator arrays [10]
In [9], classical light in the paraxial regime diffracted through a honeycomb lattice of helical waveguides, which is mathematically equivalent to the Schrodinger equation

Summary

Introduction

Photonic topological insulators (PTIs) were proposed [2,3] and realized in microwaves [4]. This photonic system exhibits topological edge states residing in the bulk gap [9,31] – see Fig. 2(b).

Results

Conclusion