近日，山东师范大学蔡阳健团队研究了合成二能级系统中的电调谐光子拓扑准粒子。该项研究成果发表在2025年11月3日出版的《自然—物理学》杂志上。
光子拓扑准粒子，如skyrmions和hopons，是在空间和时间域中具有多种拓扑构型的结构光场。这使得它们成为各种基于拓扑的应用程序的有希望的信息载体。然而，通过对应用外部场来有效控制光子准粒子仍然具有挑战性，因为它们本质上是中性粒子。因此，这些准粒子不表现出与外部电场和磁场的直接耦合。
研究组通过光子准粒子-晶体相互作用合成了一个双能级光子系统；准粒子的两个正交分量模拟自旋向上和自旋向下。通过创建和电气控制作用于两能级系统的伪磁场，研究组展示了拓扑准粒子中独特的几何相位。利用这个两级平台，展示了二维空间和三维空间中不同光子粒子之间非平凡跃迁的电调谐。这种特殊的技术可以推广到控制其他拓扑准粒子，如skyrmion束和hopons。该演示为电控制光子拓扑准粒子提供了一条途径，为经典和量子信息处理中具有拓扑结构的光电应用铺平了道路。
附：英文原文
Title: Electrically tuning photonic topological quasiparticles in synthetic two-level system
Author: Jia, Junhui, Ren, Jianbin, Zhou, Shiwen, Zeng, Zepei, Lin, Haolin, Hu, Yanwen, Li, Zhen, Shen, Yijie, Chen, Zhenqiang, Chen, Xianfeng, Cai, Yangjian, Fu, Shenhe
Issue&Volume: 2025-11-03
Abstract: Photonic topological quasiparticles, such as skyrmions and hopfions, are structured light fields with versatile topological configurations in space and time domains. This makes them promising information carriers for various topology-based applications. However, effectively controlling photonic quasiparticles by using external fields remains challenging because they are, in essence, neutral particles. Therefore, these quasiparticles do not exhibit direct coupling with external electric and magnetic fields. Here we synthesized a two-level photonic system via photonic quasiparticle–crystal interaction; two orthogonal components of the quasiparticle emulate the spin-up and spin-down. By creating and electrically controlling a pseudomagnetic field that acts on the two-level system, we demonstrated a unique geometric phase in the topological quasiparticles. Using this two-level platform, we demonstrated electrical tuning of non-trivial transitions between different photonic skyrmions in two-dimensional space and hopfions in three-dimensional space. This specific technique can be generalized to control other topological quasiparticles, such as skyrmion bundles and braids. Our demonstration provides a route to electrically controlling photonic topological quasiparticles, paving the way for optoelectronic applications with topological structures in classical and quantum information processing.
DOI: 10.1038/s41567-025-03074-6
Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41567-025-03074-6