Abstract of the Talk
Photonic graphene, the photonic analog of graphene constructed with waveguide arrays arranged in honeycomb lattice (HCL) geometry, has provided a powerful platform to emulate graphene physics while discovering new phenomena that would otherwise be inaccessible in real graphene. In recent studies, artificial HCLs have been successfully employed to investigate a variety of fundamental phenomena such as strong sublattice symmetry breaking, strain-induced pseudomagnetic fields, Berry curvature effects and photonic topological insulators.
In this talk, I will discuss some of our recent work based on photonic graphene, including unconventional edge states, the pseudospin-mediated vortex generation and topological charge flipping, the Aharonov-Bohm-like interferences, and valley Bloch oscillations and Landau-Zener tunneling in photonic graphene that illustrates the important influence of the lattice geometry and wavepacket dynamics at Dirac points.
Biography of the Speaker
Zhigang Chen earned his Ph.D. from Bryn Mawr College in 1995. After two years of postdoctoral work, he was promoted to the rank of Senior Research Staff Member at Princeton University before joining the faculty at San Francisco State University. He has published over 300 papers in top-rated journals and conference proceedings including the Nature and Science family of journals. His work received numerous citations with an h-index of 45 (according to ISI Web of Sci.) and was featured frequently in science magazines and news media. Dr. Chen received the Chinese Distinguished Oversea Young Scholar Award in 2004, and was elected as a Fellow of the Optical Society of America in 2009 and a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2015. Dr. Chen serves as an Editor for Optics Letters, Scientific Reports, Science Bulletin, and Advances in Physics X, and as a Program/General Chair for CLEO-Fundamental Science in 2016/18.