We introduce the concept of adiabatic topological photonic structures, which allows us to overcome many of the limitations of topological photonic metasurfaces. We demonstrate that topological metasurfaces with slowly varying gauge fields significantly improve trapping of optical modes, and also offer excellent guiding features in both spin-Hall and valley-Hall topological photonic structures. Adiabatic variation of the mass terms at the domain walls makes topological boundary modes less sensitive to details of the lattice, perceiving the structure as an effectively homogeneous Dirac metasurface. As the result, the modes exhibit longer radiative lifetime and propagation distance, while retaining their topological resilience. At the same time, localized modes trapped due to the 2D variation of the mass term exhibit high quality factors and controllable radiative properties, which, along with non-zero angular momentum of their far field, makes them of great interest for applications.
|