Recently, D. Bongiovanni, a distinguished international assistant researcher of Professor Chen Zhigang’s research group from the School of Physics of Nankai University, jointly with interntional cooperation teams, theoretically proposed a dynamic topological phase transition model driven by nonlinear interaction of soliton array for the first time, which revealed the generation of “generative” topological phase transition in the dynamic process and adjoint “generation” and “disappearance” phenomenon of topological boundary states. This work has creatively connected the nonlinear soliton states with nontrivial topological phase and demonstrated classic “generative” nonlinear topological physical phenomena, and therefore further provided people with knowledge of interaction between nonlinear and topological photonics. The research results were published online in the international top journal Physical Review Letters under the title of “Dynamically Emerging Topological Phase Transitions in Nonlinear Interacting Soliton Lattices”.

Fig. 1 Evolution of soliton lattice driven by nonlinearity a1 - a2 refer to light intensity distribution of soliton lattice in real space and corresponding energy band structure diagram; b1 - b3 refer to lattice diagram and two typical phenomena of soliton lattice evolution driven by nonlinearity Topological phase transition and crossover.

Nankai University is the first completion unit and D. Bongiovanni, post-doc of Nankai University is the first author. H. Buljan, distinguished professor of Nankai University / Professor of University of Zagreb, and Chen Zhigang, chair professor of Nankai University are co-corresponding authors. Partners also include professor Hu Yi, Song Daohong and doctoral student Hu Zhichan of Nankai University. The work has been subsidized by National Key R & D Program of Ministry of Science and Technology of the People's Republic of China, and National Natural Science Foundation Program of China.

The research group has made important progress in the frontier research of nonlinear topological photonics in recent two years, with research work has been published in top academic journals like Science, Light: Science & Applications, and Physical Review Letters.  

Link to the Paper:

https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.127.184101