Floquet-driven light transport in programmable photonic processors via discretized evolution of synthetic magnetic fields
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Abstract
Photons, unlike electrons, do not couple directly to magnetic fields, yet synthetic gauge fields can impart magnetic-like responses and enable directional transport. Discretized Floquet evolution provides a controlled route, where the time-ordered sequencing of non-commuting Hamiltonians imprints complex hopping phases and breaks time-reversal symmetry. However, stabilizing such driven dynamics and observing unambiguous signatures of these effects on a reconfigurable platform has remained challenging. Here we demonstrate synthetic gauge fields for light on a programmable photonic processor by implementing discretized Floquet drives that combine static and dynamic phases. The resulting dynamics exhibit chiral circulation that reverses under drive inversion, flux-controlled interference with high visibility, and robust directional flow stabilized by optimizing the driving period. We further characterize the system using a first-harmonic phase as an order parameter, whose per-period winding number quantifies angular drift and reverses sign with the drive order. These results establish discretized Floquet evolution as a versatile framework for driven photonics, providing a programmable route to engineer gauge fields, stabilize driven phases, and probe winding-number signatures of chiral transport.