Engineering topological materials in microwave cavity arrays

Understand

We present a scalable architecture for the exploration of interacting topological phases of photons in arrays of microwave cavities, using established techniques from cavity and circuit quantum electrodynamics.

• A time-reversal symmetry breaking (non-reciprocal) flux is induced by coupling the microwave cavities to ferrites, allowing for the production of a variety of topological band structures including the $\alpha=1/4$ Hofstadter model.
• Effective photon-photon interactions are included by coupling the cavities to superconducting qubits, and are sufficient to produce a $\nu=1/2$ bosonic Laughlin puddle.
• We demonstrate by exact diagonalization that this architecture is robust to experimentally achievable levels of disorder.