r/Optics • u/Professor_Photon_84 • 17h ago
A Lorentz-Like Force for Light: Synthetic Magnetic Fields
Enable HLS to view with audio, or disable this notification
Photons carry no charge, so a magnetic field does not deflect them.
On a lattice, a hopping charge is attach a phase to each hop; around a plaquette the phases add up to the enclosed flux.
Engineer those phases for light, and it circulates around loops, follows cyclotron-like orbits and travels one way along edges: a synthetic magnetic field for photons.
I made a short animated explainer of this idea, from the Aharonov–Bohm effect to photonic quantum-Hall edge states. Every animation is computed from the underlying model.
More on the channel
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/dqJiUbL5hHg
#Photonics
#QuantumPhysics
#TopologicalPhotonics
#ScienceCommunication