Demonstration of Time-reversal Symmetric Two-Dimensional Photonic Topological Anderson Insulator

Abstract: Recently, the impact of disorder on topological properties has attracted significant attention in photonics, especially the intriguing disorder-induced topological phase transitions in photonic topological Anderson insulators (PTAIs). However, the reported PTAIs are based on time-reversal symmetry broken systems or quasi-three-dimensional time-reversal invariant system, both of which would limit the applications in integrated optics. Here, we realize a time-reversal symmetric two-dimensional PTAI on silicon platform within the near-IR wavelength range, taking the advantageous valley degree of freedom of photonic crystal. A low-threshold topological Anderson phase transition is observed by applying disorder to the critical topologically trivial phase. Conversely, we have also realized extremely robust topologically protected edge states based on the stable topological phase. Both two phenomena are validated through theoretical Dirac Hamiltonian analysis, numerical simulations, and experimental measurements. Our proposed structure holds promise to achieve near-zero topological phase transition thresholds, which breaks the conventional cognition that strong disorder is required to induce the phase transition. It significantly alleviates the difficulty of manipulating disorder and could be extended to other systems, such as condensed matter systems where strong disorder is hard to implement. This work is also beneficial to construct highly robust photonic integrated circuits serving for on-chip photonic and quantum optic information processing. Moreover, this work also provides an outstanding platform to investigate on-chip integrated disordered systems.