Topological transitions in two-dimensional Floquet superconductors

Abstract

We demonstrate the occurrence of a topological phase transition induced by an effective magnetic field in a two-dimensional electron gas with spin-orbit coupling and in proximity to an $s$-wave superconductor. The effective, perpendicular magnetic field is generated by an in plane, off-resonant ac-magnetic field or by circularly polarized light. The conditions for entering the topological phase do not rely on fine parameter tuning: For fixed frequency, one requires a minimal amplitude of the effective field which can be evaluated analytically. In this phase, chiral edge states generally emerge for a system in stripe geometry unless the Rashba and Dresselhaus coupling have the same magnitude. In this special case, for magnetic field driving the edge states become Majorana flat bands, due to the presence of a chiral symmetry; the light irradiated system is a trivial superconductor.

14 pages; 11 figures

References in corpus (5)

• Emergence of the persistent spin helix in semiconductor quantum wells
• Unpaired Floquet Majorana fermions without magnetic fields
• Quantized conductance and large g-factor anisotropy in InSb quantum point contacts
• Linear and non-linear transport across a finite Kitaev chain: an exact analytical study
• Dynamical generation of Floquet Majorana flat bands in s-wave superconductors

Cited by in corpus (2)

• Quantum many-body scars with unconventional superconducting pairing symmetries via multibody interactions
• Single and multi-frequency driving protocols in a Rashba nanowire proximitized to an s-wave superconductor