Topological Floquet Phases in Driven Coupled Rashba Nanowires

Phys Rev Lett. 2016 Apr 29;116(17):176401. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.116.176401. Epub 2016 Apr 28.

Abstract

We consider periodically driven arrays of weakly coupled wires with conduction and valence bands of Rashba type and study the resulting Floquet states. This nonequilibrium system can be tuned into nontrivial phases such as topological insulators, Weyl semimetals, and dispersionless zero-energy edge mode regimes. In the presence of strong electron-electron interactions, we generalize these regimes to the fractional case, where elementary excitations have fractional charges e/m with m being an odd integer.