Topological energy transfer in an optomechanical system with exceptional points

Understand

Topological operations have the merit of achieving certain goals without requiring accurate control over local operational details.

• To date, topological operations have been used to control geometric phases, and have been proposed as a means for controlling the state of certain systems within their degenerate subspaces[1-8].
• More recently, it was predicted that topological operations can be extended to transfer energy between normal modes, provided that the system possesses a specific type of degeneracy known as an exceptional point (EP)[9-11].
• Here we demonstrate the transfer of energy between two modes of a cryogenic optomechanical device by topological operations.