Floquet Analysis on an Irradiated Nodal Surface Semimetal with Non-Symmorphic Symmetry

TL;DR

This paper explores how light irradiation affects nodal surface semimetals with nonsymmorphic symmetry, revealing the emergence or disappearance of Weyl points and nodal surfaces in Floquet systems, with implications for quantum technologies.

Contribution

It introduces a Floquet analysis of irradiated NSSMs, showing polarization-dependent topological phase transitions and the creation or annihilation of Weyl points and nodal surfaces.

Findings

Light polarization controls the emergence of Weyl points.

Nodal surfaces can perish or transform into Weyl points under irradiation.

High-frequency Floquet systems exhibit topological phase changes.

Abstract

A nodal surface semimetal (NSSM) features symmetry enforced band crossings along a surface within the three-dimensional (3D) Brillouin zone (BZ) and a presence of a nonsymmorphic symmetry there pushes such surfaces to stick to the BZ center or boundaries. The topological robustness of the same does not always come with nonzero Berry fluxes. We consider two such nodal surfaces (NS), one with zero and another with nonzero topological charges and investigate the effect of light irradiation on them. We find that depending on the state of polarization, one can obtain additional Weyl points/ nodal surfaces in the corresponding Floquet Hamiltonians. Particularly, using a simple two band spinless/spin polarized models with no spin orbit coupling, we emphasize the low energy behavior of the continuum Hamiltonians close to the band crossings and its evolution in a Floquet system in the high frequency limit. In the Floquet system, we also find the nodal surfaces to perish or new multi Weyl points to get popped up for different polarization scenario or different NSSM Hamiltonians. Our findings open up important avenues on what out of equilibrium NSSM systems can offer in many active fields including quantum computations.