The concepts of topological states have captured much attention in condensed-matter physics and the importance of these systems is subsequently realized in other subfields, such as cold atom and classical waves. In the past few years, the attention was focused on “topological insulators” while very recently, the attention is shifting to “Weyl semi-metals” which have gapless bulk band structures with pairs of topological points (called Weyl points) and topologically-protected surface states. In this work, we designed, fabricated and experimentally characterized a Weyl photonic crystal with both single and double Weyl points. We used tight-binding Hamiltonian as a starting point to guide us to the structures that have the correct symmetry to support topological features including synthetic gauge flux and associated Weyl points. We fabricated for the first time a system that exhibits Weyl points of topological charge higher than 1. In our photonic crystal, the existence of the double Weyl point is made possible by the degeneracy between the two single Weyl points which is protected by C3 symmetry and time reversal. Once the C3 symmetry is broken, two Weyl points with charge of ±1 will separate and each forms a linear dispersion in all three directions. Nontrivial 2D bulk band gaps for fixed kz and Weyl points were confirmed by angle-resolved transmission spectra. The robustness of the associated surface states against kz-preserved scattering was experimentally observed.

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Che Ting Chan, "Photonic crystals possessing single and double Weyl points (Conference Presentation)," Proc. SPIE 9920, Active Photonic Materials VIII, 99201K (Presented at SPIE Nanoscience + Engineering: August 31, 2016; Published: 9 November 2016); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2237703.5159519634001.