A nonlinear non-Hermitian topological laser system based on the higher-order corner states of the 2-dimensional (2D) Su-Schrieffer-Heeger (SSH) model is investigated. The topological property of this nonlinear non-Hermitian system described by the quench dynamics is in accordance with that of a normal 2D SSH model. In the topological phase, all sites belonging to the topological corner states begin to emit stable laser light when a pulse is given to any one site of the lattice, while no laser light is emitted when the lattice is in the trivial phase. Furthermore, the next-nearest-neighbor (NNN) couplings are introduced into the strong-coupling unit cells of the 2D SSH model, which open a band gap in the continuous band structure. In the topological phase, similar to the case of 2D SSH model without NNN couplings, the corner sites can emit stable laser light due to the robustness of the higher-order corner states when the NNN couplings are regarded as the perturbation. However, amplitude of the stimulated site does not decay to zero in the trivial phase, because the existence of the NNN couplings in the strong-coupling unit cells make the lattice like one in the tetramer limit, and a weaker laser light is emitted by each corner.

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The combination of topological photonics and quantum optics has promising applications. In previous works, the role of the edge states of conventional topological optical structure in the coherent coupling between atoms has been discussed. Besides the optimistic results, we find that if the coupling coefficient between the atom and element-cavity exceeds the coupling coefficient between cavities in the array, atoms cannot be effectively coupled with each other through the edge states. Here, we generalize to higher-order structures and explore the dynamics of three atoms interacting with the cavity array based on the kagome-type optically coupled-cavity array with topologically protected corner states. Three atoms are theoretically coupled in three corner cavities, and various quantum behaviors can be displayed in different parameters. It is shown that three atoms mediated by the corner state can be coherently coupled with each other, without the constraint of the coupling coefficient, and can induce entanglement, which shows that the high-order topological optical structure has more advantages than the conventional topological optical structure in coherent coupling among qubits. In addition, we also studied atoms mediated by edge states. The results show that the atoms mediated by edge states can be coherently coupled only in the weak coupling regime, and the entanglement effect induced by the edge states is not as good as that of the corner state. It indicates that the corner state is more useful than the edge state in the second-order optical topological structure. Our results can offer references for applying optical topological structure in quantum computing and quantum communication.