[Research Highlights Vol.47] Photonic Circuits Hosting Electromagnetic Waves with Pseudospin

Metamaterials are purposely built devices mimicking structural features of normal materials, but with unusual physical properties. Photonic crystals, for example, are periodic nanostructures consisting of material components with different refractive indices. They have lattice symmetries like solids, but the constituents of the unit cell of a photonic crystal are ‘bits’ of the different bulk materials. Similar to the structure–property relationships resulting from the behavior of electrons in solids (e.g. semiconduction), photonic crystals offer ways for manipulating the propagation of light. Now, Xiao Hu at the International Center for Materials Nanoarchitectonics, National Institute for Materials Science, Tsukuba, Japan, and colleagues have succeeded in creating a photonic metamaterial that displays a special property known as a topological photonic state.