Experimental Realization of Anti‐Unitary Wave‐Chaotic Photonic Topological Insulator Graphs Showing Kramers Degeneracy and Symplectic Ensemble Statistics

Abstract Working in analogy with topological insulators in condensed matter, photonic topological insulators (PTI) have been experimentally realized, and protected electromagnetic edge‐modes have been demonstrated in such systems. Moreover, PTI technology also emulates a synthetic spin‐1/2 degree of freedom (DOF) in the reflectionless topological modes. The spin‐1/2 DOF is carried by quantum valley Hall (QVH)/quantum spin Hall (QSH) interface modes created from the bianisotropic meta waveguide platform and realized both in simulation and experiment. The PTI setting is employed to build an ensemble of wave chaotic 1D metric graphs that display statistical properties consistent with Gaussian symplectic ensemble (GSE) statistics. The two critical ingredients required to create a physical system in the GSE universality class, the half‐integer‐spin DOF and preserved time‐reversal invariance, are clearly realized in the QVH/QSH interface modes. The anti‐unitary T‐operator is identified for the PTI Hamiltonian underlying the experimental realization. An ensemble of PTI‐edgemode metric graphs are proposed and experimentally demonstrated. Then, the Kramers degeneracy of eigenmodes of the PTI‐graph systems is demonstrated with both numerical and experimental studies. Further, spectral statistical studies of the edgemode graphs are studied, and good agreement with the GSE theoretical predictions is found. The PTI chaotic graph structures present an innovative and easily extendable platform for continued future investigation of GSE systems.