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Proposal for realizing anomalous Floquet insulators via Chern band annihilation
by Carolyn Zhang, Tobias Holder, Netanel H. Lindner, Mark Rudner, Erez Berg
This Submission thread is now published as
Submission summary
| Authors (as registered SciPost users): | Carolyn Zhang |
| Submission information | |
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| Preprint Link: | https://arxiv.org/abs/2108.01708v3 (pdf) |
| Date accepted: | 2022-03-08 |
| Date submitted: | 2022-02-09 05:00 |
| Submitted by: | Zhang, Carolyn |
| Submitted to: | SciPost Physics |
| Ontological classification | |
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| Academic field: | Physics |
| Specialties: |
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| Approach: | Theoretical |
Abstract
Two-dimensional periodically driven systems can host an unconventional topological phase unattainable for equilibrium systems, termed the Anomalous Floquet-Anderson insulator (AFAI). The AFAI features a quasi-energy spectrum with chiral edge modes and a fully localized bulk, leading to non-adiabatic but quantized charge pumping. Here, we show how such a Floquet phase can be realized in a driven, disordered Quantum Anomalous Hall insulator, which is assumed to have two critical energies where the localization length diverges, carrying states with opposite Chern numbers. Driving the system at a frequency close to resonance between these two energies localizes the critical states and annihilates the Chern bands, giving rise to an AFAI phase. We exemplify this principle by studying a model for a driven, magnetically doped topological insulator film, where the annihilation of the Chern bands and the formation of the AFAI phase is demonstrated using the rotating wave approximation. This is complemented by a scaling analysis of the localization length for two copies of a quantum Hall network model with a tunable coupling between them. We find that by tuning the frequency of the driving close to resonance, the driving strength required to stabilize the AFAI phase can be made arbitrarily small.
List of changes
We added "Proposal for" at the beginning of the title to emphasize that this paper is a theoretical proposal, not an experimental result. We also added a paragraph at the top of pg 3 ("Note that while we study Chern band...") to clarify the relationship between our work and another proposal for realizing the AFAI (Ref. 65), based on tuning disorder.
Published as SciPost Phys. 12, 124 (2022)