CANCELLED

Physical Society Colloquium

How to make photons feel magnetic fields, and implications thereof

Mikael Rechstman

Department of Physics
Pennsylvania State University

When electrons moving in a two-dimensional plane are subject to an out-of-plane magnetic field they move in circles called cyclotron orbits as a result of the Lorentz force. Treated quantum mechanically, these orbits become quantized like the orbitals of an atom, forming highly degenerate states called Landau levels. When the electrons interact strongly with one another, this high degeneracy leads to fascinating new physics such as the fractional quantum Hall effect. In this talk, I will show how we made photons “feel” a magnetic field and thus form Landau levels in a photonic crystal, despite the fact that photons carry no charge and thus cannot experience the Lorentz force. This increases the strength of interaction between light and matter, which has implications in quantum optics and integrated photonics. Time permitting, I will discuss another proposal for increasing light-matter coupling, namely using photonic Chern insulator edge states for wide-bandwidth slow light.