The discovery of topological photonic states has revolutionized our understanding of electromagnetic propagation and scattering. Endowed with topological robustness, photonic edge modes are not reflected from structural imperfections and disordered regions. Here we demonstrate robust propagation along reconfigurable pathways defined by synthetic gauge fields within a topological photonic metacrystal. The flow of microwave radiation in helical edge modes following arbitrary contours of the synthetic gauge field between bianisotropic metacrystal domains is unimpeded. This is demonstrated in measurements of the spectrum of transmission and time delay along the topological domain walls. These results provide a framework for freely steering electromagnetic radiation within photonic structures.

This study investigated interactive exchange in lovers and the associated interpersonal brain synchronization (IBS) using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS)-based hyperscanning. Three types of female-male dyads, lovers, friends, and strangers, performed a cooperation task during which brain activity was recorded in right frontoparietal regions. We measured better cooperative behavior in lover dyads compared with friend and stranger dyads. Lover dyads demonstrated increased IBS in right superior frontal cortex, which also covaried with their task performance. Granger causality analyses in lover dyads revealed stronger directional synchronization from females to males than from males to females, suggesting different roles for females and males during cooperation. Our study refines the theoretical explanation of romantic interaction between lovers. Hum Brain Mapp 38:831-841, 2017. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Previous studies have shown that brain activity between partners is synchronized during cooperative exchange. Whether this neural synchronization depends on the gender of partner (i.e., opposite or same to the participant) is open to be explored. In current study, we used functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) based hyperscanning to study cooperation in a two-person game (female-female, female-male, and male-male) while assaying brain-to-brain interactions. Cooperation was greater in male-male pairs than in female-female pairs, with intermediate cooperation levels for female-male pairs. More importantly, in dyads with partners with opposite gender (female-male pairs), we found significant task-related cross-brain coherence in frontal regions (i.e., frontopolar cortex, orbitofrontal cortex, and left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex) whereas the cooperation in same gender dyads (female-female pairs and male-male pairs) was not associated with such synchronization. Moreover, the changes of such interbrain coherence across task blocks were significantly correlated with change in degree of cooperation only in mixed-sex dyads. These findings suggested that different neural processes underlie cooperation between mixed-sex and same-sex dyadic interactions.