Fig. 3: Details of the Experimental Setup and Collected Data.

a Illustration of the experimental setup. A 786 nm continuous wave laser is utilized for the excitation of the random-dimer disordered SSH photonic lattice through a lensed fiber. A Y-splitter is incorporated to control polarization and optimize the coupling to the photonic chip. The Transverse Electric (TE) mode is excited by accurately adjusting the paddle of the polarization controller and monitoring the detector counts transmitted through the chip. A polarizing beam splitter enables exciting the TE modes by minimizing the detector count. The intensity of the facet light distribution is imaged using a microscope objective and a CCD camera. b Extraction of the output light distribution. The light propagates from the left to the right, and scatters at the end of this photonic lattice. Two images, both with identical focus, are captured to ascertain the distribution of light intensity. II represents the output pattern of the lattice, while I serves as a reference pattern of the illuminated lattice that aids in pinpointing exact coordinates in pixel space. The section within the dotted line in both images indicates the position of the lattice, obtained from the reference image. The position of each site is then extracted, and it is used to deduce the light intensity distribution in the lattice. The scale bar in I and II corresponds to the length of 20 μ m. c Comparison between experimentally measured and simulated light intensity distributions. I, II, III, and IV correspond to the output intensity distribution at a distance of 1000μm, following the 41st single-site excitation with random-dimer on-site potentials ϵ = 0, 0.1, 0.185, and 0.3, respectively.