Disordered Chern insulator with a two step Floquet drive

TL;DR

This paper investigates a disordered Floquet-driven Chern insulator, revealing complex topological phase transitions, including disorder-induced topological Anderson insulators, through analytical and numerical methods.

Contribution

It provides an analytical phase diagram for a two-step Floquet Chern insulator and uncovers disorder-induced topological transitions and a levitation-annihilation mechanism.

Findings

Different topological phases characterized by edge modes at 0 and π quasienergies.

Disorder induces transitions from topological to trivial phases and vice versa.

Identification of a disorder-induced topological Anderson insulator phase.

Abstract

We explore the physics of a Chern insulator subjected to a two step Floquet drive. We analytically obtain the phase diagram and show that the system can exhibit different topological phases characterized by presence and chirality of edge-modes in the two bulk gaps of the Floquet quasienergy spectrum, around $0$ and $\pi$. We find that the phase of the system depends on the mean but not on the amplitude of the drive. The bulk topological invariants characterizing the phases can be extracted by mapping the unitary evolution within a time period to an energetically trivial but topologically non-trivial time evolution. An extensive numerical study of the bulk topological invariants in the presence of quenched disorder reveals new transitions induced by strong disorder (i) from the different topological to trivial insulator phases and (ii) from a trivial to a topological Anderson insulator phase at intermediate disorder strengths. Careful analysis of level statistics of the quasienergy spectrum indicates a `levitation-annihilation' mechanism near these transitions.