Welcome to PhoToCon

The Photonic Topological Wave Control in Complex Electromagnetic Media (PhoToCon) project aspires to investigate photonic topological wave propagation in complex media for advanced wave manipulation enabled with the use of photonic crystals, metamaterials and metasurfaces. In physics, topological order was introduced in connection to the Hall effect where two-dimensional electrons in a uniform magnetic field form quantized cyclotron orbits of discrete energies called Landau levels. In the case that the electron energy lies within a Landau energy gap, the measured edge resistance exhibits plateaus values and remains constant within an accuracy of around one part in a billion, despite the impurities and the noise of the environments, the sample and the laboratory. In periodic systems the topological invariance is attributed through the Chern number which assumes integer values that present jumps when a topological transition takes place. In 2008 topology was translated the realm of photonics which is the objective of the PhoToCon project. Topological photonics attract such great scientific attention mainly due the fundamental feature coming from the topological protection. i.e. the unidirectional, back-scattering-free propagation of electromagnetic energy, immune to any perturbations which promises to pave the path for robust devices and novel applications. Our investigations focus on the topological wave propagation and manipulation, in particular the leaky-wave type radiation for wavefront and emission control and the dynamic routing of the topological waves, i.e. the intercoupling of topically (non)trivial and (non)trivial modes of variable characteristics. Although the aforementioned mechanisms are generally known in optics the translation to the real of topological photonics is not yet established. In parallel we will explore novel approaches for accessing photonic structures that fulfill the topological conditions, in particular graphene metamaterials.

The project is supported by the Hellenic Foundation for Research and Innovation H.F.R.I., as the Implementation Institution of Subproject 1 “Basic Research Financing (Horizontal Support of all Sciences)”, which is included in the component 4.5 “Promote Research and Innovation” of the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (“Greece 2.0”). This project is carried out within the framework of the National Recovery and Resilience Plan Greece 2.0, funded by the European Union – NextGenerationEU (Implementation body: HFRI)