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Updated: May 24, 2026

Fabrication And Characterization Of Photonic Crystal Slow Light Waveguides And Cavities
Published on: November 30, 2012
Realization of a chiral photonic-crystal cavity with broken time-reversal symmetry
Kiran M Kulkarni1,2, Hongjing Xu3, Fuyang Tay4
1Applied Physics Graduate Program, Smalley-Curl Institute, Rice University, Houston, TX, USA.
Abstract:
Chiral cavities offer an intriguing way to manipulate material properties by breaking fundamental symmetries. However, only a few chiral cavity implementations exhibiting broken time-reversal symmetry have been demonstrated, with most relying on either strong magnetic fields, circularly polarized Floquet driving, or ultrastrong coupling between cavity modes and matter excitations. Here, we present a one-dimensional terahertz photonic-crystal cavity that exhibits broken time-reversal symmetry. The cavity consists of a silicon wafer sandwiched between InSb wafers. By exploiting the nonreciprocal terahertz response of a magnetoplasma and the low electron effective mass in InSb, a circularly polarized cavity mode at 0.67 THz under a modest magnetic field of 0.3 T, with a quality factor exceeding 50 is realized. Temperature-, magnetic field-, and polarization-dependent measurements and simulations demonstrate the chiral cavity with broken time-reversal symmetry, providing a robust platform for exploring chiral light-matter interactions and vacuum dressed quantum condensed matter in the terahertz regime.
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