Work

Floquet engineering of topological semimetals with bicircularly polarized light

Year: 2025

Type: article

Abstract: We study the effect of illumination of bicircularly polarized light (BCL) on topological semimetals, namely multifold fermion and line-node semimetals. We demonstrate, by means of both low-energy and lattice models, that the band-structures of both multifold fermions and line-node semimetal exhibit rich features with BCL illumination. For multifold fermions, we show that if the relative amplitude, r , between the two frequency components of the BCL is related to the relative frequency, η , in such a way that r 2 = η , then the band touching points remain unchanged without any shift or band gap opening for any choice of the material-dependent parameters. For other choices of the BCL parameters, we find both gapped phases as well as gapless phases with shifted band touching points. Line-node semimetals also exhibit diverse phases, ranging from protected line-nodes under illumination to point nodes, by tuning the BCL parameters r and η . Overall, our analytical and numerical results establish BCL as a versatile tool for obtaining tunable topological phases which can be potentially observed in future experiments with BCL.

Source: New Journal of Physics

DOI: 10.1088/1367-2630/adb645

Authors: Maitri Ganguli, Aneek Jana, Awadhesh Narayan

Institution: Indian Institute of Science Bangalore

Language: English

Topic: Topological Materials and Phenomena

Subfield: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

Field: Physics and Astronomy

Domain: Physical Sciences

Open Access status: gold

Estimated APC paid: $2,610

Funders: Indian Institute of Science, Department of Science and Technology, Ministry of Science and Technology, India