Using optical systems to simulate topological systems in momentum space and measure their topological numbers

Abstract

We propose a new scheme for optical quantum simulation of topological systems: by using optical systems to simulate the variation of eigenstates of topological systems in momentum space, we can obtain the information of topological numbers. In this paper the scheme is applied to the one-dimensional (1D) Su–Schrieffer–Heeger (SSH) model and the two-dimensional (2D) Bernevig–Hughes–Zhang (BHZ) model. In addition, in order to apply our scheme to 2D topological systems, we design a method of calculating topological numbers by line integral. Furthermore, we propose a more effective optical simulation scheme for the 2D topological system: we do the optical simulation around discontinuity points to obtain the vorticity of every discontinuity points and the topological number is just the sum of the vorticity of all discontinuity points.