New Journal of Physics (Jan 2024)

Tunable chiral bound states in a dimer chain of coupled resonators

  • Jing Li,
  • Jing Lu,
  • Z R Gong,
  • Lan Zhou

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1088/1367-2630/ad311c
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 26, no. 3
p. 033025

Abstract

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We study an excitation hopping on a one-dimensional (1D) dimer chain of coupled resonators with the alternate on-site photon energies, which interacts with a two-level emitter (TLE) by a coupling point or two adjacent coupling points. In the single-excitation subspace, this system not only possesses two energy bands with propagating states, but also possesses photonic bound states. The number of bound states depends on the coupling forms between the TLE and the dimer chain. It is found that when the TLE is locally coupled to one resonator of the dimer chain, the bound-state that has mirror reflection symmetry. When the TLE is nonlocally coupled to two adjacent resonators, three bound states with preferred direction arise due to the mirror symmetry breaking. By using chirality to measure the asymmetry, it is found that the chirality of these bound states can be tuned by changing the energy differences of single photon in the adjacent resonators, the coupling strengths and the transition energy of the TLE.

Keywords