Locked Subharmonic Oscillations in the Entanglement Spectrum of a Periodically Driven Topological Chain

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that a sharp subharmonic signature appears in the entanglement spectrum of a periodically driven topological chain, revealing Floquet topological coherence through entanglement spectroscopy.

Contribution

It shows that entanglement spectrum period-doubling serves as a sharp probe of Floquet topological phases in a free-fermion system, linking entanglement features to topological edge modes.

Findings

Entanglement spectrum exhibits period doubling in a driven topological chain.

Subharmonic response is absent in trivial phases without edge modes.

Entanglement spectroscopy can detect Floquet topological coherence.

Abstract

Periodically driven quantum systems can exhibit subharmonic response, usually characterized through physical observables and often discussed in interacting settings. Here we show that a sharp subharmonic signature already appears in the entanglement spectrum of a number-conserving free-fermion system. We study a two-step driven Su-Schrieffer-Heeger chain whose Floquet operator supports symmetry-protected edge modes at quasienergies $0$ and $\pi$. When the initial state is a coherent superposition of these two edge sectors, we show that the subsystem correlation matrix alternates between two stroboscopic structures, and the entanglement spectrum is period-doubled as a set, while an overlap-tracked entanglement level shows a robust period-doubling response with Fourier weight concentrated at half the drive frequency. By contrast, diagonal edge densities remain flat by sublattice symmetry, while an off-diagonal edge-bond observable provides the corresponding linear one-body comparator. The effect disappears both when the initial state is replaced by a stroboscopically stationary Floquet eigenstate built from the same topological mode content, and when the system is placed in the topologically trivial phase where no edge modes exist. Altogether, these establish zero-$\pi$ Floquet topology as a necessary condition and coherent nonequilibrium preparation as the additional sufficient ingredient. Our results identify entanglement spectroscopy as a sharp subsystem-resolved probe of Floquet topological coherence.