Shaping bulk Fermi arcs in the momentum space of photonic crystal slabs

Exceptional points (EPs) are special spectral degeneracies of non-Hermitian operators: at the EP, the complex eigenvalues coalesce, i.e., they become degenerate in both their real and imaginary parts. In two-dimensional (2D) photonic crystal lattices, these elements can be tailored through structural engineering. In particular, it is known that a quadratic degeneracy in the photonic band structure can be split into a pair of Dirac points (DPs) by breaking one of the unit-cell symmetries, and each DP can be further split into a pair of EPs by introducing losses. Each EP of the pair is then connected by an open isofrequency curve, called the bulk Fermi arc (BFA). In this work, we introduce a simplified effective Hamiltonian model accounting for the main physical properties of these EPs and BFAs. Then, we systematically investigate, through numerical simulations, how EPs as well as the related BFA depend on the type and amount of broken symmetries in the given 2D unit cell of a realistic photonic crystal slab implementation. Our results show that it is possible to tailor the position and distance of the EP pair in reciprocal space, as well as the curvature and orientation of the associated BFA, by deterministically tuning the unit-cell structure. Importantly, the symmetry-breaking strategy we propose is general and can be applied to a broad range of photonic crystal designs beyond the specific example studied here. This approach opens interesting possibilities for exploiting EPs in applications involving photonic crystal lattices in, e.g., light-emitting devices or fundamental physics studies.