MIT researchers developed a scalable fabrication platform for damage-free integration of molecular materials into nanoscale functional electronic devices, which could enable applications in emerging computing, sensing, and quantum technologies.

Topological corner states are protected against defects and structural imperfections that is beneficial for robust information or power transmission. In turn, vortex beams carrying orbital angular momentum can act as key carriers for information encoding. The integration of such states may enable robust topological photonic devices with large transmission capacity, yet fundamental barriers exist: zero-dimensional corner states reported so far in higher-order topological insulators with single-mode waveguides cannot readily accommodate vortices. In their article in Science Bulletin, a joint team of researchers from China and Russia has integrated them successfully and has shown that such states can exist in both linear and nonlinear regimes. According to the study, these corner vortex states exhibit outstanding robustness over a wide power range. Unlike vortex solitons in trivial lattices, they form without any power threshold, breaking the limitations of conventional vortex soliton generation. This work opens new avenues for topologically protected information transfer and wavefront control in topological photonics.