Berry Curvature and Analogs of the QHE in Photonics
Speaker:
Srinivas Raghu, Princeton University
Date & Time:
November 9, 2004 - 9:00am
Location:
- | Berry Curvature and Analogs of the QHE in Photonics Physics and Astronomy |
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| Srinivas Raghu, Princeton University The quantum Hall effect (QHE) is associated with an incompressible liquid of fermions in an external magnetic field. Both the magnetic field, which gives rise to landau quantization, and the fermionic nature of the electrons, which gives rise to incompressibility even in the non-interacting system (integer quantum hall effect) seem to play crucial roles here. In this talk, I will discuss what (if any) of this can be applied in the field of photonics, where the particles are neutral bosons. The key feature that is only recently being studied is the so called Berry curvature of the Maxwell normal-mode problem. I will explicitly discuss a photonic system which gives rise to QHE-like features (non-zero chern numbers of bloch bands, chiral edge modes) in the presence of magneto-optic effects that break the symmetry of time-reversal. I will give semi-classical arguments and show numerical examples. |