Floquet interface states in illuminated three-dimensional topological insulators

Abstract

Recent experiments showed that the surface of a three dimensional topological insulator develops gaps in the Floquet-Bloch band spectrum when illuminated with a circularly polarized laser. These Floquet-Bloch bands are characterized by non-trivial Chern numbers which only depend on the helicity of the polarization of the radiation field. Here we propose a setup consisting of a pair of counter-rotating lasers, and show that one-dimensional chiral states emerge at the interface between the two lasers. These interface states turn out to be spin-polarized and may trigger interesting applications in the field of optoelectronics and spintronics.

5 pages with 3 figures + supplemental material

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Cited by in corpus (15)

• Topological invariants of Floquet systems: General formulation, special properties, and Floquet topological defects
• All-optical band engineering of gapped Dirac materials
• Floquet band structure of a semi-Dirac system
• Effective Floquet Hamiltonian in the low-frequency regime
• Quadratic band touching points and flat bands in two-dimensional topological Floquet systems
• Optically induced Lifshitz transition in bilayer graphene
• Topological invariants for Floquet-Bloch systems with chiral, time-reversal, or particle-hole symmetry
• Floquet engineering of excitons in semiconductor quantum dots
• Light-induced bound electron states in two-dimensional systems: Contribution to electron transport
• Universal driving protocol for symmetry-protected Floquet topological phases
• Floquet theory of spin dynamics under circularly polarized light pulses
• Floquet boundary states in AB-stacked graphite
• All-optical control of excitons in semiconductor quantum wells
• Low-frequency and Moiré Floquet engineering: a review
• Optical trapping of electrons in graphene