Unpaired Dirac cones are bandstructures with two bands crossing at a single point in the Brillouin zone. It is known that photonic bandstructures can exhibit pairs of Dirac cones, similar to graphene; unpaired cones, however, have not observed in photonics, and have been observed in condensed-matter systems only among topological insulator surface states. We show that unpaired Dirac cones occur in a 2D photonic lattice that is not the surface of a 3D system. These modes have unusual properties, including conical diffraction and antilocalization immune to short-range disorder, due to the absence of "intervalley" scattering between Dirac cones.
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