Programmable photonic system for quantum simulation in arbitrary topologies

Synthetic dimensions have generated great interest for studying many types of topological, quantum, and many-body physics, and they offer a flexible platform for simulation of interesting physical systems, especially in high dimensions. In this Letter, we describe a programmable photonic device capable of emulating the dynamics of a broad class of Hamiltonians in lattices with arbitrary topologies and dimensions. We derive a correspondence between the physics of the device and the Hamiltonians of interest, and we simulate the physics of the device to observe a wide variety of physical phenomena, including chiral states in a Hall ladder, effective gauge potentials, and oscillations in high-dimensional lattices. Our proposed device opens new possibilities for studying topological and many-body physics in near-term experimental platforms.