Non-adiabatic bulk-surface oscillations in driven topological insulators

TL;DR

This paper reveals non-adiabatic oscillations between surface and bulk states in driven topological insulators, highlighting a fundamental surface-bulk coupling mechanism observable via time-resolved ARPES.

Contribution

It introduces the observation of coherent surface-bulk oscillations caused by resonances in driven topological insulators and models these effects using multi-level Landau-Zener physics.

Findings

Oscillations are caused by photon absorption resonances.

Oscillations lead to loss of adiabaticity during slow ramping.

Oscillations are detectable in time-resolved ARPES measurements.

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.