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Stability of Anomalous Floquet Edge Unitaries

Fenner Harper, Rahul Roy

Published Sep 20, 2016• 1 citation
OpenAlex

Abstract

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.

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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.
Periodically driven noninteracting systems may exhibit anomalous chiral edge modes, despite hosting bands with trivial topology. We find that these drives have surprising many-body analogs, corresponding to class A, which exhibit anomalous charge and information transport at the boundary. Drives of this form are applicable to generic systems of bosons, fermions, and spins, and may be characterized by the anomalous unitary operator that acts at the edge of an open system. We find that these operators are robust to all local perturbations and may be classified by a pair of coprime integers. This defines a notion of dynamical topological order that may be applied to general time-dependent systems, including many-body localized phases or time crystals.
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.
We study the circularly driven Falicov-Kimball model on a honeycomb lattice within real space Floquet dynamical mean field theory (DMFT). The noninteracting version of this model has been realized experimentally. The noninteracting system hosts an effective Haldane phase at large driving frequencies, while at intermediate frequencies it hosts an anomalous topological phase. We study the effect of two-body interactions UUU on the stability of these phases. We find that charge pumping does not remain quantized upon increasing UUU, despite the presence of edge modes in the spectrum. This can be attributed to the broadening of the edge modes due to interaction. We also calculate the rate of energy dissipation into the bath and find remarkably different behaviour in the two regimes.
In two dimensions, interacting Floquet topological phases may arise even in the absence of any protecting symmetry, exhibiting chiral edge transport that is robust to local perturbations. We explore a similar class of Floquet topological phases in three dimensions, with translational invariance but no other symmetry, which also exhibit anomalous transport at a boundary surface. By studying the space of local 2D unitary operators, we show that the boundary behavior of such phases falls into equivalence classes, each characterized by an infinite set of reciprocal lattice vectors. In turn, this provides a classification of the 3D bulk, which we conjecture is complete. We demonstrate that such phases may be generated by exactly solvable ``exchange drives'' in the bulk. In the process, we show that the edge behavior of a general exchange drive in two or three dimensions can be deduced from the geometric properties of its action in the bulk, a form of bulk-boundary correspondence.
Chiral topological phases, like quantum Hall states, are characterized by anomalous unidirectional edge transport arising from a nontrivial insulating bulk. Recent developments suggest that they can be extended to periodically driven (Floquet) systems, where quantum information is pumped in lieu of charge or energy. The authors uncover a new chiral Floquet phase of quantum dynamics, whose edge pumps quantized units of fractionalized excitations. These phases are ``radical,'' in that the quantum dimension pumped is the square root of an integer. Unexpectedly, such edge borders a bulk with dynamical anyon transmutation, demonstrating a novel form of bulk-boundary correspondence.
Recent theoretical work on time-periodically kicked Hofstadter model found robust counterpropagating edge modes. It remains unclear how ubiquitously such anomalous modes can appear, and what dictates their robustness against disorder. Here we shed further light on the nature of these modes by analyzing a simple type of periodic driving where the hopping along one spatial direction is modulated sinusoidally with time while the hopping along the other spatial direction is kept constant. We obtain the phase diagram for the quasienergy spectrum at flux 1/3 as the driving frequency $\ensuremath{\omega}$ and the hopping anisotropy are varied. A series of topologically distinct phases with counterpropagating edge modes appear due to the harmonic driving, similar to the case of a periodically kicked system studied earlier. We analyze the time dependence of the pair of Floquet edge states localized at the same edge and compare their Fourier components in the frequency domain. In the limit of small modulation, one of the Floquet edge mode within the pair can be viewed as the edge mode originally living in the other energy gap shifted in quasienergy by $\ensuremath{\hbar}\ensuremath{\omega}$, i.e., by absorption or emission of a ``photon'' of frequency $\ensuremath{\omega}$. Our result suggests that counterpropagating Floquet edge modes are generic features of periodically driven integer quantum Hall systems, and not tied to any particular driving protocol. It also suggests that the Floquet edge modes would remain robust to any static perturbations that do not destroy the chiral edge modes of static quantum Hall states.