Boston Chapter of the IEEE Photonics Society

Abstract:  Topological insulators are solid-state materials whose transport properties are immune to defects and disorder due to underlying topological order.  Perhaps the first such phenomenon was the quantum Hall effect, wherein the Hall conductivity is quantized and hence extremely robust.  In this talk, I will present the experimental observation of the topological protection of the transport of photons (rather than electrons in the solid state) in a complex dielectric structure.  I will then present the observation of optical Weyl points in the context of three-dimensional photonic crystals.  Applications of topological photonic devices include robust photonic networks and delay lines, and potentially high-power single-mode lasing.

Biography:  Mikael Rechtsman is an Assistant Professor of Physics at Penn State.  His recent work includes the first observation of optical Weyl points, photonic topological insulators, and the observation of optical artificial magnetism in waveguide arrays.  He was an Azrieli postdoctoral fellow in the group of Mordechai Segev at the Technion, Israel.  He is the recipient of the Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship and the Kavli fellowship of the National Academy of Sciences, and has published on topics in complex photonics in Physical Review Letters, Nature Photonics, Nature Physics, Nature Materials, Nature, and Science.