Generalized laws of refraction and reflection at interfaces between different photonic artificial gauge fields

Abstract

Photonics: Manipulating light with artificial fields Artificial gauge fields are a technique to engineer the potential landscape such that neutral particles mimic the dynamics of charged particles driven by external fields. Researchers in Israel and Germany, led by Mordechai Segev at Technion Israel Institute of Technology, and Georg von Freymann from the University of Kaiserslautern, Germany, and their students Moshe-Ishay Cohen and Christina Joerg, studied theoretically and experimentally what happens when waves are incident at the interface between two photonic systems made from the same material, with the only thing making them different being their artificial gauge fields. The team formulated the generalized laws of refraction and reflection at such “gauge interfaces”, and demonstrated the concepts with micro-printed waveguides arrays with different tilt angles. The research demonstrates that several interfaces between regions with differing gauge fields could be used to develop novel photonic devices.