The test of time: photonics

As we all (should) know, journal impact factor is a terrible measure of the quality of an individual article. What is more important than where an article is published is whether it has long lasting impact, and the only way to determine this for sure is to wait!

I used Web of Science to look at the most highly cited original research articles in photonics from ten years ago. Here are the top ten:

1. Photonic Floquet topological insulators (2142 citations)

This was the first work to experimentally demonstrate topological edge states in two-dimensional waveguide arrays. It was this (and related works below) which really popularized the now-booming field of topological photonics. While I'm not surprised to see it among the top articles from 2013, I wasn't expecting it to be number one!

2. Terahertz Metamaterials for Linear Polarization Conversion and Anomalous Refraction (1443 citations)

This work falls within two highly active fields: terahertz photonics and metasurfaces. Like other early works on metasurfaces (a few more appear below), the concepts were demonstrated using metallic structures. Ongoing commercialization today was enabled by the development of low loss all-dielectric metasurfaces over the following decade.

3. Photonic topological insulators (1306 citations)

This paper showed theoretically that photonic systems could be used to emulate quantum spin Hall topological phases, by using metamaterials with a judiciously-engineered magneto-electric coupling to emulate a fermionic time-reversal symmetry.

4. Imaging topological edge states in silicon photonics (1113 citations)

Experimental demonstration of a two-dimensional Chern insulator topological phase using ring resonator lattices. This platform is now used extensively for topological laser experiments and exploring other exotic topological tight binding models, including higher order topological phases.

5. Metasurface holograms for visible light (1094 citations)

6. Three-dimensional optical holography using a plasmonic metasurface (976 citations)

These articles published back-to-back in Nature Communications use the metasurface concept to create a hologram using a metallic film with a subwavelength thickness.

7. Wireless sub-THz communication system with high data rate (970 citations)

This work sagely foresaw that viral tiktok memes would drive demand for higher bandwidth mobile data. Higher bandwidth requires higher carrier frequencies, so here the authors demonstrate experimentally wireless data transmission at frequencies approaching the THz band. 

8. Photonic spin Hall effect at metasurfaces (917 citations)

Polarization-controlled beam deflection using a metallic metasurface.

9. Highly efficient gate-tunable photocurrent generation in vertical heterostructures of layered materials (912 citations)

10. Chip-integrated ultrafast graphene photodetector with high responsivity (889 citations)

The top ten is rounded out by two papers demonstrating that 2D materials including graphene can form the basis for highly efficient photodetectors.

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tl;dr: The most highly cited photonics papers in 2013 were on topological photonics, metasurfaces, terahertz and graphene.