English

Disordered Chern insulator with a two step Floquet drive

Disordered Systems and Neural Networks 2016-12-07 v2 Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics Quantum Gases Quantum Physics

Abstract

We explore the physics of a Chern insulator subjected to a two step Floquet drive. We analytically obtain the phase diagram and show that the system can exhibit different topological phases characterized by presence and chirality of edge-modes in the two bulk gaps of the Floquet quasienergy spectrum, around 00 and π\pi. We find that the phase of the system depends on the mean but not on the amplitude of the drive. The bulk topological invariants characterizing the phases can be extracted by mapping the unitary evolution within a time period to an energetically trivial but topologically non-trivial time evolution. An extensive numerical study of the bulk topological invariants in the presence of quenched disorder reveals new transitions induced by strong disorder (i) from the different topological to trivial insulator phases and (ii) from a trivial to a topological Anderson insulator phase at intermediate disorder strengths. Careful analysis of level statistics of the quasienergy spectrum indicates a `levitation-annihilation' mechanism near these transitions.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1608.06302,
  title  = {Disordered Chern insulator with a two step Floquet drive},
  author = {Sthitadhi Roy and G. J. Sreejith},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1608.06302},
  year   = {2016}
}

Comments

15 pages, 10 figures, version published in Phys. Rev. B

R2 v1 2026-06-22T15:26:55.301Z