1307.6650 (Tomoki Ozawa et al.)

Measuring geometrical and topological properties of lossy photonic
lattices    [PDF]

Tomoki Ozawa, Iacopo Carusotto

We propose a method to experimentally measure the Berry curvature and the Chern number of the photonic bands of lossy two-dimensional photonic lattices in the presence of a synthetic gauge field. Photons are coherently injected by a spatially localized pump and the transverse shift of the in-plane light distribution under the effect of an additional uniform force is considered. Depending on the pumping parameters, this offers quantitative information on either the local Berry curvature or the global Chern number. We finally give an extension of the method to the case of photonic honeycomb lattices.

View original: http://arxiv.org/abs/1307.6650