Engineering Tunable Synthetic Su-Schrieffer-Heeger Chains in Liquid Crystal Microcavities
Abstract
Optical microcavities have emerged as a powerful platform for emulating topological phases challenging to realize in conventional materials, offering precise control over dispersion, light confinement, and interactions. Among them, liquid crystal microcavities (LCMCs) offer exceptional tunability at room temperature, enabling voltage-controlled polarisation splitting, photonic spin-orbit coupling, and photonic potentials generated by self-assembled textures, such as cholesteric torons and uniform lying helix (ULH). Here, we design a LCMC hosting a dimerized ULH texture and show that the corresponding photonic potential describes two coupled Su-Schrieffer-Heeger chains with orthogonal linear polarisations, acting as an effective pseudospin degree of freedom. The applied voltage tunes the interchain coupling, enabling polarisation-dependent interactions. These results establish LCMCs as a versatile platform for tunable synthetic topological Hamiltonians.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2605.19664,
title = {Engineering Tunable Synthetic Su-Schrieffer-Heeger Chains in Liquid Crystal Microcavities},
author = {Joanna Mędrzycka and Luciano S. Ricco and Piotr Kapuściński and Marcin Muszyński and Przemysław Morawiak and Rafał Mazur and Rafał Węgłowski and Eva Oton and Przemysław Kula and Wiktor Piecek and Jacek Szczytko},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.19664},
year = {2026}
}