Stability of Periodically Driven Topological Phases against Disorder
Name
PhysRevLett.121.126803.pdf
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552.64 KB
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Author(s)
Shtanko, Oles
Movassagh, Ramis
Date Issued
September 2018
Journal
Physical Review Letters
Publisher
American Physical Society
Citation
Shtanko, Oles and Ramis Movassagh. "Stability of Periodically Driven Topological Phases against Disorder." Physical Review Letters 121, 12 (September 2018): 126803 © 2018 American Physical Society
Version
Final published version
Abstract
In recent experiments, time-dependent periodic fields are used to create exotic topological phases of matter with potential applications ranging from quantum transport to quantum computing. These nonequilibrium states, at high driving frequencies, exhibit the quintessential robustness against local disorder similar to equilibrium topological phases. However, proving the existence of such topological phases in a general setting is an open problem. We propose a universal effective theory that leverages on modern free probability theory and ideas in random matrices to analytically predict the existence of the topological phase for finite driving frequencies and across a range of disorder. We find that, depending on the strength of disorder, such systems may be topological or trivial and that there is a transition between the two. In particular, the theory predicts the critical point for the transition between the two phases and provides the critical exponents. We corroborate our results by comparing them to exact diagonalizations for driven-disordered 1D Kitaev chain and 2D Bernevig-Hughes-Zhang models and find excellent agreement. This Letter may guide the experimental efforts for exploring topological phases.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Physics
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.121.126803
