A recently-proposed class of photonic topological insulators is shown to map onto ChalkerCoddington-type networks, which were originally formulated to study disordered quantum Hall systems. Such network models are equivalent to the Floquet states of periodically-driven lattices. We show that they can exhibit topologically protected edge states even if all bands have zero Chern number, which is a characteristic property of Floquet bandstructures. These edge states can be counted by an adiabatic pumping invariant based on the winding number of the coefficient of reflection from one edge of the network.

We report on the measurement of topological invariants in an electromagnetic topological insulator analog formed by a microwave network, consisting of the winding numbers of scattering matrix eigenvalues. The experiment can be regarded as a variant of a topological pump, with non-zero winding implying the existence of topological edge states. In microwave networks, unlike most other systems exhibiting topological insulator physics, the winding can be directly observed. The effects of loss on the experimental results, and on the topological edge states, is discussed.

We report on the measurement of the spectral functions of noninteracting ultracold atoms in a three-dimensional disordered potential resulting from an optical speckle field. Varying the disorder strength by 2 orders of magnitude, we observe the crossover from the "quantum" perturbative regime of low disorder to the "classical" regime at higher disorder strength, and find an excellent agreement with numerical simulations. The method relies on the use of state-dependent disorder and the controlled transfer of atoms to create well-defined energy states. This opens new avenues for experimental investigations of three-dimensional Anderson localization.