Stability of topologically protected slow light against disorder

Abstract: Slowing down light in on-chip photonic devices strongly enhances light-matter interaction, but typically also leads to increased backscattering and small-bandwidth operation. It was shown recently that, if one modifies the edge termination of a photonic Chern insulator such that the edge mode wraps many times around the Brillouin zone, light can be slowed to arbitrarily low group velocity over a large bandwidth, without being subject to backscattering. Here we study the robustness of these in-gap slow light modes against fabrication disorder, finding that disorder on scales significantly larger than the minigaps between edge bands is tolerable. We identify the mechanism for wavepacket breakup as disorder-induced velocity renormalization and calculate the associated breakup time.