Related papers: Electromagnetic Duality Symmetry-Protected Dirac-L…
The Dirac cone underlies many unique electronic properties of graphene and topological insulators, and its band structure--two conical bands touching at a single point--has also been realized for photons in waveguide arrays, atoms in…
We demonstrate that symmetry breaking opens a new degree of freedom to tailor the energy-momentum dispersion in photonic crystals. Using a general theoretical framework in two illustrative practical structures, we show that breaking…
A single Dirac cone on the surface is the hallmark of three-dimensional (3D) topological insulators, where the double degeneracy at the Dirac point is protected by time-reversal symmetry and the spin-splitting away from the point is…
Unpinned Dirac points (DPs) are nodal point degeneracies that occur at generic momentum points lacking high symmetry, often exhibiting characteristics typically forbidden by symmetry. While this phenomenon has been observed in solid-state…
Topological semimetals, representing a new topological phase that lacks a full bandgap in bulk states and exhibiting nontrivial topological orders, recently have been extended to photonic systems, predominantly in photonic crystals and to a…
Topological characteristics of energy bands, such as Dirac/Weyl nodes, have attracted substantial interest in condensed matter systems as well as in classical wave systems. Among these energy bands, the type-II Dirac point is a nodal…
Topological phase transitions, which have fascinated generations of physicists, are always demarcated by gap closures. In this work, we propose very simple 2D photonic crystal lattices with gap closure points, i.e. band degeneracies…
At photonic Dirac points, electromagnetic waves are governed by the same equations as two-component massless relativistic fermions. However, photonic Dirac points are known to occur in pairs in "photonic graphene" and other similar photonic…
There is no assurance that interface states can be found at the boundary separating two materials. As a strong perturbation typically favors wave localization, it is natural to expect that an interface state should form more easily in the…
We apply a large-scale computational technique, known as topology optimization, to the inverse design of photonic Dirac cones. In particular, we report on a variety of photonic crystal geometries, realizable in simple isotropic dielectric…
The extraordinary electronic properties of Dirac materials, the two-dimensional partners of Weyl semimetals, arise from the linear crossings in their band structure. When the dispersion around the Dirac points is tilted, the emergence of…
Dirac semimetals, the materials featured with discrete linearly crossing points (called Dirac points) between four bands, are critical states of topologically distinct phases. Such gapless topological states have been accomplished by a…
The simulation of fermionic relativistic physics, e.g., Dirac and Weyl physics, has led to the discovery of many unprecedented phenomena in photonics, of which the optical-frequency realization is, however, still challenging. Here,…
Recently, the gapless Dirac/Weyl nodal semimetals with linear dispersion and topologically protected modes degeneracy are rapidly growing frontiers of topological physics. Especially, type-I, type-II, and critical type-III nodal semimetals…
We demonstrate from a fundamental perspective the physical and mathematical origins of band warping and band non-parabolicity in electronic and vibrational structures. Remarkably, we find a robust presence and connection with pairs of…
Dirac cones are conical singularities that occur near the degenerate points in band structures. Such singularities result in enormous unusual phenomena of the corresponding physical systems. This work investigates double Dirac cones that…
A semi-Dirac cone refers to a peculiar type of dispersion relation that is linear along the symmetry line but quadratic in the perpendicular direction. Here, I demonstrate that a photonic crystal consisting of a square array of elliptical…
Degeneracy is an omnipresent phenomenon in various physical systems, which has its roots in the preservation of geometrical symmetry. In electronic and photonic crystal systems, very often this degeneracy can be broken by virtue of strong…
It was recently demonstrated that the connectivities of bands emerging from zero frequency in dielectric photonic crystals are distinct from their electronic counterparts with the same space groups. We discover that, in an AB-layer-stacked…
The search for symmetry-protected 2D Dirac semimetals analogous to graphene is important both for fundamental and practical interest. The 2D Dirac cones are protected by crystalline symmetries and magnetic ordering may destroy their…