Long-range-interacting topological photonic lattices breaking channel-bandwidth limit.

Abstract

The presence of long-range interactions is crucial in distinguishing between abstract complex networks and wave systems. In photonics, because electromagnetic interactions between optical elements generally decay rapidly with spatial distance, most wave phenomena are modeled with neighboring interactions, which account for only a small part of conceptually possible networks. Here, we explore the impact of substantial long-range interactions in topological photonics. We demonstrate that a crystalline structure, characterized by long-range interactions in the absence of neighboring ones, can be interpreted as an overlapped lattice. This overlap model facilitates the realization of higher values of topological invariants while maintaining bandgap width in photonic topological insulators. This breaking of topology-bandgap tradeoff enables topologically protected multichannel signal processing with broad bandwidths. Under practically accessible system parameters, the result paves the way to the extension of topological physics to network science.