Topological photonics: slow light and solitons

In this talk we will describe the realization of chiral edge states for photons in a photonic Floquet topological insulator, employing optical waveguide arrays. We will describe how such topological states can be used to simultaneously overcome two shortcomings of slow-light systems, namely disorder-induced scattering (and Anderson localization) as well as low bandwidth. We will show how optical nonlinearity can be used to realize Gross-Pitaevskii-type interactions, and a resulting soliton that spectrally resides in a topological band gap.