Floquet topological transition by unpolarized light

TL;DR

This paper investigates how unpolarized, randomly changing light affects Floquet topological phases in graphene, revealing that noise can significantly alter the phase structure at certain points in the Brillouin zone.

Contribution

It demonstrates that noise-averaged Hamiltonians can accurately predict Floquet topological transitions under random polarization noise in graphene.

Findings

Noise modifies phaseband structure at Dirac points.

Noise-averaged Hamiltonian matches steady-state evolution.

In 1D, noise renormalizes drive amplitude.

Abstract

We study Floquet topological transition in irradiated graphene when the polarization of incident light changes randomly with time. We numerically confirm that the noise averaged time evolution operator approaches a steady value in the limit of exact Trotter decomposition of the whole period where incident light has different polarization at each interval of the decomposition. This steady limit is found to coincide with time-evolution operator calculated from the noise-averaged Hamiltonian. We observe that at the six corners (Dirac($K$) point) of the hexagonal Brillouin zone of graphene random Gaussian noise strongly modifies the phaseband structure induced by circularly polarized light whereas in zone-center ($\Gamma$ point) even a strong noise isn't able to do the same. This can be understood by analyzing the deterministic noise averaged Hamiltonian which has a different Fourier structure as well as lesser no of symmetries compared to the noise-free one. In 1D systems noise is found to renormalize the drive amplitude only.