Title: Synthetic non-Abelian gauge fields for photons
When: Monday, October 27, 2025, 15:00
Place: Department of Theoretical Condensed Matter Physics, Faculty of Sciences, Module 5, Seminar Room (5th Floor)
Speaker: Yi Yang, Department of Physics, The University of Hong Kong
This talk presents recent progress of synthetic non-Abelian gauge fields in photonic systems in my group. I will fist introduce some theoretical schemes for engineering these gauge fields using polarization-multiplexed driven ring resonators and photonic mesh lattices, enabling synthetic dimensions with tailored spin-orbit coupling [1–3]. Transitioning to experimental realization, we demonstrate non-Abelian electric fields in a photonic frequency chain via a polarization-multiplexed, time-modulated ring resonator [4]. By dynamically controlling polarization dephasing, rotation, and retardation, we achieve programmable manipulation of Floquet band structures and their spin-resolved quasimomentum textures. Using self-heterodyne coherent detection, we observe Zitterbewegung and its interference with Bloch oscillations. The talk concludes with a theory of light-matter interactions mediated by non-Abelian gauge fields [5], which enables the appearance of spin-polarized, squeezed Landau polaritons carrying angular momenta and multi-emitter dynamics governed by nonsymmorphic symmetries.
References
- Z. Pang, B. T. T. Wong, J. Hu, and Y. Yang, “Synthetic non-Abelian gauge fields for non-Hermitian systems,” Physical Review Letters 132, 043804 (2024).
- B. T. T. Wong, S. Yang, Z. Pang, and Y. Yang, “Synthetic non-Abelian electric fields and spin-orbit coupling in photonic synthetic dimensions,” Physical Review Letters 134, 163803 (2025).
- Z. Pang, O. Abdelghani, M. Soljačić, and Y. Yang, “Topological quantum walk in synthetic non-Abelian gauge fields,” arXiv preprint arXiv:2412.03043 (2024).
- S. Yang, B. T. T. Wong, and Y. Yang, “Non-Abelian Electric Field and Zitterbewegung on a Photonic Frequency Chain,” arXiv preprint arXiv:2509.09304 (2025).
- Q. Huang, B. T. T. Wong, Z. Pang, X. Zhang, Z. Chen, and Y. Yang, “Topological quantum electrodynamics in synthetic non-Abelian gauge fields,” arXiv preprint arXiv:2508.07669 (2025).
