Observation of photonic anomalous Floquet Topological Insulators

Abstract

Commonly, a two-dimensional topological insulator is characterized by non-zero Chern numbers associated with its band structure. In our work, we present the experimental demonstration of an anomalous topological insulator, for which the Chern numbers are always zero, and the winding number is the appropriate quantity describing the topological character of the system. We probe the robustness of the chiral edge states in such anomalous topological insulators and analyze the phase transition between topological and trivial phase.