Non-adiabatic bulk-surface oscillations in driven topological insulators

Abstract

Recent theoretical and experimental work has suggested the tantalizing possibility of opening a topological gap upon driving the surface states of a three-dimensional strong topological insulator (TI) with circularly polarized light. With this motivation, we study the response of TIs to a driving field that couples to states near the surface. We unexpectedly find coherent oscillations between the surface and the bulk and trace their appearance to unavoidable resonances caused by photon absorption from the drive. We show how these resonant oscillations may be captured by the Demkov- Osherov model of multi-level Landau-Zener physics, leading to non-trivial consequences such as the loss of adiabaticity upon slow ramping of the amplitude. We numerically demonstrate that these oscillations are observable in the time-dependent Wigner distribution, which is directly measurable in time-resolved ARPES experiments. Our results apply generically to any system with surface states in the presence of a gapped bulk, and thus suggest experimental signatures of a novel surface-bulk coupling mechanism that is fundamental for proposals to engineer non-trivial states by periodic driving.

10 pages + appendices, 8 figures, published version

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Cited by in corpus (6)

• Creating stable Floquet-Weyl semimetals by laser-driving of 3D Dirac materials
• Constraints on scattering amplitudes in multistate Landau-Zener theory
• Zitterbewegung and bulk-edge Landau-Zener tunneling in topological insulators
• A large class of solvable multistate Landau-Zener models and quantum integrability
• Generating surface states in a Weyl semi-metal by applying electromagnetic radiation
• Constant Matrix Element Approximation to Time-Resolved Angle-Resolved Photoemission Spectroscopy