Broadband photonic topological insulator based on triangular-holes array with higher energy filling efficiency

Photonic topological insulators (PTIs) bring markedly new opportunities to photonic devices with low dissipation and directional transmission of signal over a wide wavelength range due to the broadband topological protection. However, the maximum gap/mid-gap ratio of PTIs is below 10% and hardly further improved duo to the lack of new bandwidth enhancement mechanism. In this paper, a PTI with the gap/mid-gap ratio of 16.25% is proposed. The designed PTI has a honeycomb lattice structure with triangular air holes, and such a wide bandwidth is obtained by optimizing the refractive-index profile of the primitive cell for increasing the energy proportion in the geometric perturbation region. The PTI shows a large topological nontrivial gap (the gap/mid-gap ratio 33.4%) with the bandwidth approaching its theoretical limit. The edge states propagate smoothly around sharp bends within 1430–1683 nm. Due to topological protection, the bandwidth only decreases 1.38% to 1450–1683 nm under 1%-random-bias disorders. The proposed PTI has a potential application in future high-capacity and nonlinear topological photonic devices.