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Abstract Total internal reflection (TIR) governs the guiding mechanisms of almost all dielectric waveguides and therefore constrains most of the light in the material with the highest refractive index. The few options available to access the properties of lower-index materials include designs that are either lossy, periodic, exhibit limited optical bandwidth or are restricted to subwavelength modal volumes. Here, we propose and demonstrate a guiding mechanism that leverages symmetry in multilayer dielectric waveguides as well as evanescent fields to strongly confine light in low-index materials. The proposed waveguide structures exhibit unusual light properties, such as uniform field distribution with a non-Gaussian spatial profile and scale invariance of the optical mode. This guiding mechanism is general and can be further extended to various optical structures, employed for different polarizations, and in different spectral regions. Therefore, our results can have huge implications for integrated photonics and related technologies. 

We apply the homomorphism between the Schrödinger and Helmholtz-Maxwell wave equations to experimentally demonstrate an integrated photonic analogue of the zero-curvature eigenfunctions predicted in quantum mechanics. 

We experimentally demonstrate waveguiding at the critical angle in a dielectric multi-layered structure. At this exceptional point, the waveguide becomes scale invariant and the field is confined to the low-index region, with a spatially-uniform transverse profile