Second-order topological insulator in periodically driven lattice

TL;DR

This paper proposes a method to realize Floquet higher-order topological insulators in ultracold atom systems using periodic spin-dependent driving and anisotropic couplings, revealing new topological phenomena.

Contribution

It introduces a novel scheme combining spin-dependent driving and anisotropic couplings to create Floquet HOTIs with unique edge and corner states in ultracold atoms.

Findings

Emergence of Floquet second-order topological insulator with four zero-energy corner states

Gapless Wannier bands indicating interesting bulk topology

Induction of topological semimetal and non-protected corner states by anisotropic coupling

Abstract

The higher-order topological insulator (HOTI) is a new type of topological system which has special bulkedge correspondence compared with conventional topological insulators. In this work, we propose a scheme to realize Floquet HOTI in ultracold atom systems. With the combination of periodically spin-dependent driving of the superlattices and a next-next-nearest-neighbor d-wave-like anisotropic coupling term between different spin components, a Floquet second-order topological insulator with four zero-energy corner states emerges, whose Wannier bands are gapless and exhibit interesting bulk topology. Furthermore, the anisotropic coupling with nearest-neighbor form will also induce some intriguing topological phenomena, e.g. non-topologically protected corner states and topological semimetal for two different types of lattice structures respectively. Our scheme may give insight into the construction of different types of higher-order topological insulators in synthetic systems. It also provides an experimentally feasible platform to research the relations between different types of topological states and may have a wide range of applications in future.