Measuring topological invariants in photonic systems (1310.7946v1)

Abstract: Motivated by the recent theoretical and experimental progress in implementing topological orders with photons, we analyze photonic systems with different topologies and present a scheme to probe their topological features. Specifically, we propose a scheme to modify the boundary phases to manipulate edge state dynamics. Such a scheme allows one to measure the winding number of the edge states. Furthermore, we discuss the effect of loss and disorder on the validity of our approach.