Paper detail

Topological aspects in the photonic crystal analog of single-particle transport in quantum Hall systems

We present a perturbative approach to derive the semiclassical equations of motion for the two-dimensional electron dynamics under the simultaneous presence of static electric and magnetic fields, where the quantized Hall conductance is known to be directly related to the topological properties of translationally invariant magnetic Bloch bands. In close analogy to this approach, we develop a perturbative theory of two-dimensional photonic transport in gyrotropic photonic crystals to mimic the physics of quantum Hall systems. We show that a suitable permittivity grading of a gyrotropic photonic crystal is able to simulate the simultaneous presence of analog electric and magnetic field forces for photons, and we rigorously derive the topology-related term in the equation for the electromagnetic energy velocity that is formally equivalent to the electronic case. A possible experimental configuration is proposed to observe a bulk photonic analog to the quantum Hall physics in graded gyromagnetic photonic crystals.