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arXiv:1712.02789 · Physical review. B./Physical review. B

Anomalous Floquet insulators

Frederik Nathan, Dmitry A. Abanin, Erez Berg, Netanel H. Lindner, Mark Spencer Rudner

Published May 20, 2019• 82 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

Recent work has revealed that periodically driven systems may host novel topological phases that have no equilibrium counterparts. These ``anomalous Floquet insulators'' (AFIs) feature characteristic patterns of periodic particle motion. Until now, it has been an open question whether the driving regime necessary for achieving AFI dynamics is compatible with many-body localization, which is needed to ensure stability over long times. By identifying an appropriate separation of scales, here the authors answer the question affirmatively, thereby demonstrating the existence of stable AFIs.

DOI
10.1103/physrevb.99.195133

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Recent work has revealed that periodically driven systems may host novel topological phases that have no equilibrium counterparts. These ``anomalous Floquet insulators'' (AFIs) feature characteristic patterns of periodic particle motion. Until now, it has been an open question whether the driving regime necessary for achieving AFI dynamics is compatible with many-body localization, which is needed to ensure stability over long times. By identifying an appropriate separation of scales, here the authors answer the question affirmatively, thereby demonstrating the existence of stable AFIs.
It has recently been shown that periodically driven noninteracting systems may exhibit anomalous chiral edge modes, despite hosting bands with trivial topology. We obtain many-body versions of such drives, corresponding to class A, which exhibit anomalous charge transport at the edge and which reduce to their noninteracting counterparts for systems of single particles. We extend these drives to more general systems of bosons, fermions and spins, and characterise their anomalous action at the edge of an open system by an effective edge unitary. These are found to be robust to all local perturbations and may be classified by a pair of coprime integers.
The anomalous Floquet Anderson insulator (AFAI) has been theoretically predicted in stepwise periodically driven models, but its stability under more general driving protocols has not been determined. We show that adding disorder to the anomalous Floquet topological insulator realized with a continuous driving protocol in the experiment by Wintersperger et al. [Nat. Phys. 16, 1058 (2020)], supports an AFAI phase, where, for a range of disorder strengths, all the time averaged bulk states become localized, while the pumped charge in a Laughlin pump setup remains quantized.
Periodically driven systems play a prominent role in optical lattices. In these ultracold atomic systems, driving is used to create a variety of interesting behaviours, of which an important example is provided by topological states of matter. Such Floquet topological phases have a richer classification than their equilibrium counterparts. Although there exist analogues of the equilibrium topological phases that are characterised by a Chern number, the corresponding Hall conductivity, and protected edge states, there is an additional possibility. This is a phase that has a vanishing Chern number and no Hall conductivity, but nevertheless hosts anomalous topological edge states (Rudner et al ( 2013 Phys. Rev. X 3 031005 )). Due to experimental difficulties associated with the observation of such a phase, it has not been experimentally realised in optical lattices so far. In this paper, we show that optical lattices prove to be a good candidate for its realisation and observation, because they can be driven in a controlled manner. Specifically, we present a simple shaking protocol that serves to realise this special Floquet phase, discuss the specific properties that it has, and propose a method to experimentally detect this fascinating topological phase that has no counterpart in equilibrium systems.
Periodically driven systems have recently been shown to host topological phases that are inherently dynamical in character, opening up a new arena in which to explore topological physics. One important group of such phases, known as Floquet topological insulators, arise in systems of free fermions and exhibit protected topological edge modes analogous to the edge modes of static topological insulators. In this work, the authors use methods from K theory to provide a complete topological classification of Floquet topological phases of this kind. The main result is a periodic table for Floquet topological insulators, which may be viewed as a time-dependent extension of the periodic table of topological insulators and superconductors originally introduced by Alexei Kitaev.
The topological characterization of nonequilibrium topological matter is highly nontrivial because familiar approaches designed for equilibrium topological phases may not apply. In the presence of crystal symmetry, Floquet topological insulator states cannot be easily distinguished from normal insulators by a set of symmetry eigenvalues at high-symmetry points in the Brillouin zone. This work advocates a physically motivated, easy-to-implement approach to enhance the symmetry analysis to distinguish between a variety of Floquet topological phases. Using a two-dimensional inversion-symmetric periodically driven system as an example, we show that the symmetry eigenvalues for anomalous Floquet topological states, of both first order and second order, are the same as for normal atomic insulators. However, the topological states can be distinguished from one another and from normal insulators by inspecting the occurrence of stable dynamical symmetry inversion points in their microscopic dynamics. The analysis points to a position-space picture for understanding how topological boundary states can coexist with localized bulk states in anomalous Floquet topological phases.
Time-periodic (Floquet) drive can give rise to novel symmetry breaking and topological phases of matter. Recently, we showed that a quintessential Floquet topological phase known as the anomalous Floquet-Anderson insulator is stable to noise on the timing of its Floquet drive. Here, we perturb the anomalous Floquet-Anderson insulator at a single incommensurate frequency, resulting in a quasiperiodic two-tone drive. Our numerics indicate that a robust topological phase survives at weak noise with topological pumping that is more stable than the case of white noise. Within the topological phase, we show that particles move subdiffusively, which is directly responsible for stabilizing topological transport. Surprisingly, we discover that when quasiperiodic noise is sufficiently strong to kill topology, the system appears to exhibit diffusive dynamics, suggesting that the correlated structure of the quasiperiodic noise becomes irrelevant.