Non-diagonal disorder enhanced topological properties of graphene with laser irradiation

Abstract

Laser irradiation, as a versatile tool to tune topological properties of electronic systems, is under intensive studies. Experimentally, laser irradiation induced anomalous Hall effect in graphene has been observed (McIver et al., Nat. Phys. 16, 38 (2020)). Disorder is ubiquitous in real materials, and it has been shown that diagonal disorders, i.e., onsite disorder, can enhance topological properties of time-periodically driven quantum materials (Titum et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 114, 056801 (2015)). Here, we investigate circularly polarized laser irradiated graphene with non-diagonal disorders, i.e., disordered tunneling, and find that disorder can induce nontrivial topological properties, characterized by Bott index and the real-space Chern number. Moreover, we show that one can turn on the laser irradiation non-adiabatically to drive the disordered graphene into non-trivial topological phase. It is a scheme which is especially interesting for experimental implementations.

5 pages, 5 figures

References in corpus (10)

• Localization of interacting fermions at high temperature
• Photovoltaic Hall effect in graphene
• Topological characterization of periodically-driven quantum systems
• The distribution of the ratio of consecutive level spacings in random matrix ensembles
• Topological Anderson Insulator
• Tuning laser-induced bandgaps in graphene
• Disorder-induced Floquet Topological Insulators
• Multiterminal Conductance of a Floquet Topological Insulator
• Topological Hofstadter Insulators in a Two-Dimensional Quasicrystal
• Disordered Chern insulator with a two step Floquet drive