Photonic Floquet Landau-Zener tunneling and temporal beam splitters

Landau-Zener tunneling (LZT), i.e., the nonadiabatic transition under strong parameter driving in multilevel systems, is ubiquitous in physics, providing a powerful tool for coherent wave control both in quantum and classical systems. While previous works mainly focus on LZT between two energy bands in time-invariant crystals, here, we construct synthetic time-periodic temporal lattices from two coupled fiber loops and demonstrate dc- and ac-driven LZTs between periodic Floquet bands. We show that dc- and ac-driven LZTs display distinctive tunneling and interference characteristics, which can be harnessed to realize fully reconfigurable LZT beam splitter arrangements. As a potential application to signal processing, we realize a 4-bit temporal beam encoder for classical light pulses using a reconfigurable LZT beam splitter network. Our work introduces and experimentally demonstrates a new class of reconfigurable linear optics circuits harnessing Floquet LZT, which may find versatile applications in temporal beam control, signal processing, quantum simulations, and information processing.