Tunable chiral bound states in a dimer chain of coupled resonators

Abstract

We study an excitation hopping on a one-dimensional (1D) dimer chain of coupled resonators with
the alternate on-site photon energies, which interacts with a two-level emitter (TLE) by a coupling
point or two adjacent coupling points. In the single-excitation subspace, this system not only
possesses two energy bands with propagating states, but also possesses photonic bound states. The
number of bound states depends on the coupling forms between the TLE and the dimer chain. It is found
that when the TLE is locally coupled to one resonator of the dimer chain, the bound-state that has
mirror reflection symmetry. When the TLE is nonlocally coupled to two adjacent resonators, three
bound states with preferred direction arise due to the mirror symmetry breaking. By using chirality
to measure the asymmetry, it is found that the chirality of these bound states can be tuned by changing
the energy differences of single photon in the adjacent resonators, the coupling strengths and the
transition energy of the TLE.