The landmark discovery of photonic topological insulators has opened a unique route for disorder-immune light transport with unprecedented possibilities of practical applications. Flexible reconfiguration of topological light pathways can enable a completely new paradigm for high-density photonics routing, sustaining the growing demand for data capacity. By strategically interfacing non-Hermitian and topological physics, we demonstrate arbitrary robust light steering in reconfigurable non-Hermitian junctions, where novel chiral non-Hermitian topological states can propagate at an interface of the gain and loss domains. In contrast to previously studied topological states confined only at the static boundary/interface of the structure, the new non-Hermitian-controlled topological state can enable robust transmission links of light inside the bulk, fully utilizing the entire footprint of a photonic topological insulator.
Through systematically manipulating the couplings in the photonic lattice, the topological nature emerges associated with edge state dynamics. Here, we demonstrate a robust photonic zero mode sustained by a spatial non-Hermitian phase transition in a parity-time (PT) symmetric lattice despite the same topological order across the entire system and a flexible topological photonic lattice with multiple topologically nontrivial dispersion bands. Heterodyne measurements clearly reveal the ultrafast transport dynamics and energy of the edge states at a femtosecond scale, validating the designed topological features.
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