Whittaker, C. E. and Cancellieri, E. and Walker, P. M. and Royall, B. and Tapia Rodriguez, L. E. and Clarke, E. and Whittaker, D. M. and Schomerus, H. and Skolnick, M. S. and Krizhanovskii, D. N. (2019) Effect of photonic spin-orbit coupling on the topological edge modes of a Su-Schrieffer-Heeger chain. Physical review B, 99 (8): 081402. ISSN 2469-9950
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Abstract
We study the effect of photonic spin-orbit coupling (SOC) in micropillar lattices on the topological edge states of a one-dimensional chain with a zigzag geometry, corresponding to the Su-Schrieffer-Heeger model equipped with an additional internal degree of freedom. The system combines the strong hopping anisotropy of the p-type pillar modes with the large TE-TM splitting in Bragg microcavities. By resolving the photoluminescence emission in energy and polarization we probe the effects of the resulting SOC on the spatial and spectral properties of the edge modes. We find that the edge modes feature a fine structure of states that penetrate by different amounts into the bulk of the chain, depending on the strength of the SOC terms present, thereby opening a route to manipulation of the topological states in the system.