Floquet topological insulator in semiconductor quantum wells

By N. Lindner, G. Refael, V. Galitski. 2010

1,458 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Topological phases of matter have captured our imagination over the past few years, with tantalizing properties such as robust edge modes and exotic non-Abelian excitations, and potential applications ranging from semiconductor spintronics to topological quantum computation. Despite recent advancements in the field, our ability to control topological transitions remains limited, and usually requires changing material or structural properties. We show, using Floquet theory, that a topological state can be induced in a semiconductor quantum well, initially in the trivial phase. This can be achieved by irradiation with microwave frequencies, without changing the well structure, closing the gap and crossing the phase transition. We show that the quasi-energy spectrum exhibits a single pair of helical edge states. We discuss the necessary experimental parameters for our proposal. This proposal provides an example and a proof of principle of a new non-equilibrium topological state, the Floquet topological insulator, introduced in this paper.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Materials Chemistry

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1e67dc1b8ddba30945030409f81943f66537992f

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In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

In Materials Chemistry

Citations in the corpus

Floquet topological transitions in a driven one-dimensional topological insulator (2015, background): “The sample could be either graphene [5,6,8,14], a trivial insulator [7], a superconductor [15], a three-dimensional Dirac semimetal [16], or a topological insulator [17].”
Periodic table for Floquet topological insulators (2016, background): “[16] Netanel H Lindner, Gil Refael, and Victor Galitski, “Floquet topological insulator in semiconductor quantum wells,” Nat.”
Nonequilibrium dynamical mean-field theory and its applications (2013, methodology): “The Floquet formalism has been used in the study of Floquet topological insulators (Kitagawaet al., 2011; Lindner et al., 2011; Oka and Aoki, 2009b).”
Topological polaritons from quantum wells in photonic waveguides or microcavities (2014, positive): “concept of Floquet topological insulators [18], which rely on the specific mixing of two topologically trivial fermionic bands made possible by the absorption or emission of”
Artificial gauge fields in materials and engineered systems (2017, neutral): “3], one generally uses the terminology “Floquet–Chern insulator” [34, 54,36,37].”
Perspective on topological states of non-Hermitian lattices (2019, background): “Along this new avenue for topological states, studies have focused on diverse materials and systems including normal insulators, [14], graphene [131, 132, 133, 134], other twodimensional materials [135, 136, 137], Rashba wires [138], ultracold matter [139], and topological insulators [140, 130, 141,”
Experimental observation of optical Weyl points and Fermi arc-like surface states (2016, background): “[30] Netanel H Lindner, Gil Refael, and Victor Galitski.”
Topological Phases of Sound and Light (2014, background): “[7] Netanel H.”
Chiral floquet phases of many-body localized bosons (2016, background): “This should be differentiated from various Floquet engineering proposals, which aim at effectively realizing equilibrium phases through periodic driving [25,26].”
Anomalous edge states and the bulk-edge correspondence for periodically-driven two dimensional systems (2012, background): “In the case of periodically driven systems, some robust topological phenomena have been demonstrated to be stabilized by additional symmetries such as an effective time-reversal symmetry [12,15,17].”