No Arabic abstract
We show the presence of Floquet-Weyl and Floquet-topological-insulator phases in a stacked two-dimensional ring-network lattice. The Weyl points in the three-dimensional Brillouin zone and Fermi-arc surface states are clearly demonstrated in the quasienergy spectrum of the system in the Weyl phase. In addition, chiral surface states coexist in this phase. The Floquet-topological-insulator phase is characterized by the winding number of two in the reflection matrices of the semi-infinite system and resulting two gapless surface states in the quasienergy g ap of the bulk. The phase diagram of the system is derived in the two-parameter space of hopping S-matrices among the rings. We also discuss a possible optical realization of the system together with the introduction of synthetic gauge fields.
We study the effects of a synthetic gauge field and pseudospin-orbit interaction in a stacked two-dimensional ring-network model. The model was introduced to simulate light propagation in the corresponding ring-resonator lattice, and is thus completely bosonic. Without these two items, the model exhibits Floquet-Weyl and Floquet-topological-insulator phases with topologically gapless and gapped band structures, respectively. The synthetic magnetic field implemented in the model results in a three-dimensional Hofstadter-butterfly-type spectrum in a photonic platform. The resulting gaps are characterization by the winding number of relevant S-matrices together with the Chern number of the bulk bands. The pseudospin-orbit interaction is defined as the mixing term between two pseudospin degrees of freedom in the rings, namely, the clockwise and counter-clockwise modes. It destroys the Floquet-topological-insulator phases, while the Floquet-Weyl phase with multiple Weyl points can be preserved by breaking the space-inversion symmetry. Implementing both the synthetic gauge field and pseudospin-orbit interaction requires a certain nonreciprocity.
The Weyl semimetal exhibits various interesting physical phenomena because of the Weyl points, i.e., linear band-crossings. We show by Floquet theory that a linearly polarized light applied to a band insulator can induce controllable Weyl points. In a tight-binding model, we classify different types of photoinduced Weyl points that lead to a rich phase diagram characterized by the Chern number defined on each momentum slices of the bulk states. Taking account of the nonequilibrium electron distribution, we calculate and explain the nonmonotonous anomalous Hall conductivity in terms of the light frequency controlled shift of Weyl points position, which also allows us to examine the conductivitys dependence on the driving electric field.
The Su-Schrieffer-Heeger model of polyacetylene is a paradigmatic Hamiltonian exhibiting non-trivial edge states. By using Floquet theory we study how the spectrum of this one-dimensional topological insulator is affected by a time-dependent potential. In particular, we evidence the competition among different photon-assisted processes and the native topology of the unperturbed Hamiltonian to settle the resulting topology at different driving frequencies. While some regions of the quasienergy spectrum develop new gaps hosting Floquet edge states, the native gap can be dramatically reduced and the original edge states may be destroyed or replaced by new Floquet edge states. Our study is complemented by an analysis of Zak phase applied to the Floquet bands. Besides serving as a simple example for understanding the physics of driven topological phases, our results could find a promising test-ground in cold matter experiments.
Previous theoretical and experimental research has shown that current NISQ devices constitute powerful platforms for analogue quantum simulation. With the exquisite level of control offered by state-of-the-art quantum computers, we show that one can go further and implement a wide class of Floquet Hamiltonians, or timedependent Hamiltonians in general. We then implement a single-qubit version of these models in the IBM Quantum Experience and experimentally realize a temporal version of the Bernevig-Hughes-Zhang Chern insulator. From our data we can infer the presence of a topological transition, thus realizing an earlier proposal of topological frequency conversion by Martin, Refael, and Halperin. Our study highlights promises and limitations when studying many-body systems through multi-frequency driving of quantum computers.
We demonstrate the photonic Floquet topological insulator (PFTI) in an atomic vapor with nonlinear susceptibilities. The interference of three coupling fields splits the energy levels periodically to form a periodic refractive index structure with honeycomb symmetry that can be adjusted by the choice of frequency detunings and intensities of the coupling fields, which all affect the appearance of Dirac cones in the momentum space. When the honeycomb lattice sites are helically ordered along the propagation direction, we obtain a PFTI in the atomic vapor in which an obliquely incident beam moves along the zigzag edge without scattering energy into the PFTI, due to the confinement of the edge states. The appearance of Dirac cones and the formation of PFTI is strongly affected by the nonlinear susceptibilities; i.e. the PFTI can be shut off by the third-order nonlinear susceptibility and re-opened up by the fifth-order one.