Floquet engineering of magnetic topological insulator MnBi${}_2$Te${}_4$ films

Abstract

Floquet engineering is an important way to manipulate the electronic states of condensed matter physics. Recently, the discovery of the magnetic topological insulator MnBi${}_2$Te${}_4$ and its family provided a valuable platform to study magnetic topological phenomena, such as, the quantum anomalous Hall effect, the axion insulator state and the topological magnetoelectric effect. In this work, based on the effective model and first-principles calculations in combination with the Floquet theory, we reveal that the circularly polarized light (CPL) induces the sign reversal of the Chern number of odd-septuple-layer (SL) MnBi${}_2$Te${}_4$ thin films. In contrast, the CPL drives the axion insulator state into the quantum anomalous Hall state in even-SL MnBi${}_2$Te${}_4$ thin films. More interestingly, if the topmost van der Waals gap between the surface layer and the below bulk in MnBi${}_2$Te${}_4$ films is slightly expanded, a high Chern number $|C|=2$ can be realized under the CPL. Our work demonstrates that the light can induce rich magnetic topological phases in MnBi${}_2$Te${}_4$ films, which might have potential applications in optoelectronic devices.

7 pages, 4 figures

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Cited by in corpus (12)

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• Floquet optical selection rules in black phosphorus
• Chiral Floquet Engineering on Topological Fermions in Chiral Crystals
• Controllable Weyl Nodes and Fermi Arcs from Floquet Engineering Triple Fermions
• Universally optimizable strategy for magnetic gaps towards high-temperature quantum anomalous Hall states via magnetic-insulator/topological-insulator building-blocks
• Symmetry-driven anisotropic coupling effect in antiferromagnetic topological insulator: Mechanism for high-Chern-number quantum anomalous Hall state
• Electrically tunable high-Chern-number quasiflat bands in twisted antiferromagnetic topological insulators
• Electronic states bound by repulsive potentials in graphene irradiated by a circularly polarized electromagnetic field
• Emergent Weyl-like points in periodically modulated systems
• Elementary excitations in the hybrid Bose-Fermi system induced by circularly polarized light in a two-dimensional gas of charge carriers with different masses
• Optically induced delocalization of electrons bound by attractive potentials