Anomalous Floquet Anderson insulators

Our theoretical study on Anomalous Floquet Anderson insulators in periodically-driven honeycomb lattices was published in Physical Review B!

Periodically-driven systems can support phases of matter that are fundamentally different compared to static systems. One particularly intriguing example are so-called anomalous Floquet Anderson insulators,  (AFAIs), which support a fully localized bulk that coexists with extended chiral edge modes. Anomalous Floquet Anderson insulators have been theoretically predicted in step-wise periodically-driven models, but its stability under more general driving protocols hasn't been determined and no experimental realizations have been reported so far. We show that adding disorder to the anomalous Floquet topological insulator realized in our K-lab with a continuous driving protocol, supports an AFAI phase, where, for a range of disorder strengths, all the time averaged bulk states become localized, while the pumped charge in a Laughlin pump setup remains quantized.

Original publication:

Anomalous Floquet Anderson insulator in a continuously driven optical lattice,
Arijit Dutta, Efe Sen, Jun-Hui Zheng, Monika Aidelsburger and Walter Hofstetter
Physical Review B 109, L121114 (2024)