Engineering of topological phases in driven thin topological insulator: Structure inversion asymmetry effect

TL;DR

This paper explores how high-frequency electromagnetic fields and system parameters like magnetic impurities and structural asymmetry influence topological phases in thin topological insulators, enabling phase transitions with minimal heating.

Contribution

It provides a detailed analysis of how electromagnetic driving and structural asymmetry induce and control topological phase transitions in thin topological insulators.

Findings

Phase transitions between multiple topological phases can be induced by tuning system parameters.

High-frequency electromagnetic fields enable control of topological states without significant heating.

Structural inversion asymmetry significantly affects the emergence of quantum phases.

Abstract

We investigate the effect of a high frequency electromagnetic field with both of circularly and linearly polarization, on the emergence of quantum phases on thin topological insulators. Simultaneously, the influence of the system parameters (such as magnetic impurity, thickness engineering and structural inversion asymmetry of the potential) on emergence of topological phases is studied. We take our attention to the high frequency regime in which it is possible to consider an expansion for the Floquet Hamiltonian in terms of orders of 1/\Omega. The topological invariants are determined and it is demonstrated that some phase transitions between quantum anomalous Hall insulator, quantum pseudospin Hall insulator, quantum spin Hall insulator and normal insulator can be induced by altering the aforementioned parameters of the system. To avoid heating process, tuning of the system parameters gives us the opportunity to observe these phase transitions at small intensities of light.