Abstract

The defining property of a topological system is that it exhibits some physical property that is highly robust to perturbations, namely, it is topologically protected. In recent years, it has been demonstrated that such phenomena are not confined to the domain of condensed matter physics (for example, in the quantum and spin Hall effects), but rather can be found in other systems such as photonics, ultracold atoms, acoustics, polaritonics, etc. In this talk I will present our experimental results on the effect of nonlinearity on topological photonic systems. First, I will show the observation of edge solitons, and the implications of nonlinearity upon them. Next, I will demonstrate how nonlinearity can act to quantize transport in photonic Thouless pumps, despite the absence of perfect band filling. Nonlinearity is a close cousin of interparticle interactions for bosonic systems, so we expect our results to be widely applicable beyond photonics.