Valley-Hall-like photonic topological insulators with vanishing Berry curvature

Valley-Hall-like photonic topological insulators are designed in kagome-lattice photonic crystals with C3v point-group symmetry. The photonic crystal consists of circular air holes in pure dielectric materials. Different from conventional valley-Hall photonic topological insulators with nonvanishing Berry curvature and valley Chern numbers, the proposed insulators have vanishing Berry curvature and their topological invariants are described by a quantized electric polarization. Topological transition can be realized by tuning the structural size and topological edge states appear at the interface between photonic crystals with different topological phases. Numerical analyses show the proposed insulators preserve important features of valley-Hall photonic insulators such as valley transport with little backscattering.