No Arabic abstract
Motivated by the quest for experimentally accessible dynamical probes of Floquet topological insulators, we formulate the linear response theory of a periodically driven system. We illustrate the applications of this formalism by giving general expressions for optical conductivity of Floquet systems, including its homodyne and heterodyne components and beyond. We obtain the Floquet optical conductivity of specific driven models, including two-dimensional Dirac material such as the surface of a topological insulator, graphene, and the Haldane model irradiated with circularly or linearly polarized laser, as well as semiconductor quantum well driven by an ac potential. We obtain approximate analytical expressions and perform numerically exact calculations of the Floquet optical conductivity in different scenarios of the occupation of the Floquet bands, in particular, the diagonal Floquet distribution and the distribution obtained after a quench. We comment on experimental signatures and detection of Floquet topological phases using optical probes.
Periodically driven systems can host so called anomalous topological phases, in which protected boundary states coexist with topologically trivial Floquet bulk bands. We introduce an anomalous version of reflection symmetry protected topological crystalline insulators, obtained as a stack of weakly-coupled two-dimensional layers. The system has tunable and robust surface Dirac cones even though the mirror Chern numbers of the Floquet bulk bands vanish. The number of surface Dirac cones is given by a new topological invariant determined from the scattering matrix of the system. Further, we find that due to particle-hole symmetry, the positions of Dirac cones in the surface Brillouin zone are controlled by an additional invariant, counting the parity of modes present at high symmetry points.
Anderson localization in two-dimensional topological insulators takes place via the so-called levitation and pair annihilation process. As disorder is increased, extended bulk states carrying opposite topological invariants move towards each other in energy, reducing the size of the topological gap, eventually meeting and localizing. This results in a topologically trivial Anderson insulator. Here, we introduce the anomalous levitation and pair annihilation, a process unique to periodically-driven, or Floquet systems. Due to the periodicity of the quasienergy spectrum, we find it is possible for the topological gap to increase as a function of disorder strength. Thus, after all bulk states have localized, the system remains topologically nontrivial, forming an anomalous Floquet Anderson insulator (AFAI) phase. We show a concrete example for this process, adding disorder via onsite potential kicks to a Chern insulator model. By changing the period between kicks, we can tune which type of (conventional or anomalous) levitation-and-annihilation occurs in the system. We expect our results to be applicable to generic Floquet topological systems and to provide an accessible way to realize AFAIs experimentally, without the need for multi-step driving schemes.
We propose a versatile framework to dynamically generate Floquet higher-order topological insulators by multi-step driving of topologically trivial Hamiltonians. Two analytically solvable examples are used to illustrate this procedure to yield Floquet quadrupole and octupole insulators with zero- and/or $pi$-corner modes protected by mirror symmetries. Furthermore, we introduce dynamical topological invariants from the full unitary return map and show its phase bands contain Weyl singularities whose topological charges form dynamical multipole moments in the Brillouin zone. Combining them with the topological index of Floquet Hamiltonian gives a pair of $mathbb{Z}_2$ invariant $ u_0$ and $ u_pi$ which fully characterize the higher-order topology and predict the appearance of zero- and $pi$-corner modes. Our work establishes a systematic route to construct and characterize Floquet higher-order topological phases.
The anomalous Floquet Anderson insulator (AFAI) is a two dimensional periodically driven system in which static disorder stabilizes two topologically distinct phases in the thermodynamic limit. The presence of a unit-conducting chiral edge mode and the essential role of disorder induced localization are reminiscent of the integer quantum Hall (IQH) effect. At the same time, chirality in the AFAI is introduced via an orchestrated driving protocol, there is no magnetic field, no energy conservation, and no (Landau level) band structure. In this paper we show that in spite of these differences the AFAI topological phase transition is in the IQH universality class. We do so by mapping the system onto an effective theory describing phase coherent transport in the system at large length scales. Unlike with other disordered systems, the form of this theory is almost fully determined by symmetry and topological consistency criteria, and can even be guessed without calculation. (However, we back this expectation by a first principle derivation.) Its equivalence to the Pruisken theory of the IQH demonstrates the above equivalence. At the same time it makes predictions on the emergent quantization of transport coefficients, and the delocalization of bulk states at quantum criticality which we test against numerical simulations.
We develop a theory of topological transitions in a Floquet topological insulator, using graphene irradiated by circularly polarized light as a concrete realization. We demonstrate that a hallmark signature of such transitions in a static system, i.e. metallic bulk transport with conductivity of order $e^2/h$, is substantially suppressed at some Floquet topological transitions in the clean system. We determine the conditions for this suppression analytically and confirm our results in numerical simulations. Remarkably, introducing disorder dramatically enhances this transport by several orders of magnitude.