Topological classification of Chern-type insulators with the photonic Green function

Abstract

The Chern topological numbers of a material system are traditionally written in terms of the Berry curvature which depends explicitly on the material band structure and on the Bloch eigenwaves. Here, we demonstrate that it is possible to calculate the gap Chern numbers of a photonic platform without having any detailed knowledge of its band structure, relying simply on the system photonic Green function. It is shown that the gap Chern number is given by an integral of the photonic Green function along a line of the complex frequency plane parallel to the imaginary axis. Our theory applies to arbitrary frequency dispersive fully three-dimensional photonic crystals, as well as to the case of electromagnetic continua with no intrinsic periodicity.