Bandwidth-resonant Floquet states in honeycomb optical lattices

Abstract

We investigate, within Floquet theory, topological phases in the out-of-equilibrium system that consists of fermions in a circularly shaken honeycomb optical lattice. We concentrate on the intermediate regime, in which the shaking frequency is of the same order of magnitude as the band width, such that adjacent Floquet bands start to overlap, creating a hierarchy of band inversions. It is shown that two-phonon resonances provide a topological phase that can be described within the Bernevig–Hughes–Zhang model of HgTe quantum wells. This allows for an understanding of out-of-equilibrium topological phases in terms of simple band inversions, similar to equilibrium systems.

Keywords

• Floquet
• honeycomb optical lattice
• topological states
• quantum phase transition