Thouless Pumping in a Driven-Dissipative Kerr Resonator Array.

Thouless pumping is an emblematic manifestation of topology in physics, referring to the ability to induce a quantized transport of charge across a system by simply varying one of its parameters periodically in time. The original concept of Thouless pumping involves a noninteracting system, and has been implemented in several platforms. One current challenge in the field is to extend this concept to interacting systems.

Enhanced Cavity Optomechanics with Quantum-Well Exciton Polaritons.

Semiconductor microresonators embedding quantum wells can host tightly confined and mutually interacting excitonic, optical, and mechanical modes at once. We theoretically investigate the case where the system operates in the strong exciton-photon coupling regime, while the optical and excitonic resonances are parametrically modulated by the interaction with a mechanical mode. Owing to the large exciton-phonon coupling at play in semiconductors, we predict an enhancement of polariton-phonon interactions by 2 orders of magnitude with respect to mere optomechanical coupling: a near-unity single-polariton quantum cooperativity is within reach for current semiconductor resonator platforms.

Kardar-Parisi-Zhang universality in a one-dimensional polariton condensate.

Revealing universal behaviours is a hallmark of statistical physics. Phenomena such as the stochastic growth of crystalline surfaces and of interfaces in bacterial colonies, and spin transport in quantum magnets all belong to the same universality class, despite the great plurality of physical mechanisms they involve at the microscopic level. More specifically, in all these systems, space-time correlations show power-law scalings characterized by universal critical exponents.

Measuring Topological Invariants in a Polaritonic Analog of Graphene.

Topological materials rely on engineering global properties of their bulk energy bands called topological invariants. These invariants, usually defined over the entire Brillouin zone, are related to the existence of protected edge states. However, for an important class of Hamiltonians corresponding to 2D lattices with time-reversal and chiral symmetry (e.

Semi-Dirac Transport and Anisotropic Localization in Polariton Honeycomb Lattices.

Compression dramatically changes the transport and localization properties of graphene. This is intimately related to the change of symmetry of the Dirac cone when the particle hopping is different along different directions of the lattice. In particular, for a critical compression, a semi-Dirac cone is formed with massless and massive dispersions along perpendicular directions.