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Updated: Jun 27, 2025

Spectral and Angle-Resolved Magneto-Optical Characterization of Photonic Nanostructures
Published on: November 21, 2019
Visual observation of photonic Floquet-Bloch oscillations
Zhen Zhang1, Yuan Li2, Xiankai Sun3
1Wuhan National Laboratory for Optoelectronics and School of Optical and Electronic Information, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, Hubei, 430074, China.
Abstract:
Bloch oscillations (BOs), an important transport phenomenon, have been studied extensively in static systems but remain mysterious in Floquet systems. Here, by harnessing notions from photonic analogy, we propose a generalization of the existing BOs in photonic Floquet lattices, namely the "photonic Floquet-Bloch oscillations", which refer to rescaled photonic Bloch oscillations with a period of extended least common multiple of the modulation period and the Bloch oscillation period. Next, we report the first visual observation of such photonic Floquet-Bloch oscillations (FBOs) by employing waveguide fluorescence microscopy. Most significantly, the FBOs surpass the existing BOs in Floquet systems and exhibit exotic properties on their own, including fractal spectrum and fractional Floquet tunneling. This new transport mechanism offers an intriguing method of wave manipulation that may contribute to rapidly developing fields in photonics, condensed matter physics, and quantum physics.
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