Integrated and Steerable Vortex Lasers using Bound States in Continuum

Steering the beam of a wave source has been demonstrated using mechanical and non-mechanical techniques. While mechanical techniques are bulky and slow, non-mechanical techniques rely on breaking the symmetry of the refractive index profile either using asymmetric structure or injecting a non-uniform current. In this contribution, we theoretically and experimentally demonstrated a new type of topological steering of light sources in which the phase offset is provided by Floquet-Bloch phase in periodic structure. It was shown that in periodic structures, there exist singular states in the radiation region of the band diagram that exhibit diverging quality factor. Thus light sources can operate at these states with lower power threshold. The existence of these singular states are topologically protected, and their momentum are very sensitive to any small perturbations, which is used to control the steering angle. By uniformly controlling some parameters in the system, such as a physical dimension or injecting current uniformly, the beam of the light source steers. Our experimental demonstrations open new paradigm in the implementation of light steering with applications in data communications, bio imaging and sensing.