Dresden 2017 – scientific programme
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MA: Fachverband Magnetismus
MA 12: Transport: Graphene and Carbon Nanostructures (jointly with DY, DS, HL, MA, O)
MA 12.7: Talk
Monday, March 20, 2017, 16:45–17:00, HSZ 204
Time evolution of Floquet states in graphene — •Matteo Puviani1, Francesco Lenzini1, and Franca Manghi1,2 — 1Dipartimento FIM, Università di Modena e Reggio Emilia — 2CNR - Institute of NanoSciences - S3, Modena
When a time-periodic field is applied to electrons in a lattice the Bloch theorem can be applied twice, both in space and in time, to describe the photon-dressed quasiparticles which are formed. This is the essence of Floquet theory, which has recently attracted a large renewed interest for its ability to describe topological phases in driven quantum systems. The discovery that circularly polarized light may induce nontrivial topological behavior in materials which would be standard in static condition has opened the way to the realization of the so-called Floquet Topological Insulators. In these systems, the topological phases may be engineered and manipulated by tunable controls such as polarization, periodicity and amplitude of the external perturbation.
In the presence of a continuous time-periodic driving, electrons are in a non-equilibrium steady state characterized by a time-periodic dependence of the wave function, and therefore of the expectation values of any observable. In this talk we will consider the prototypical case of graphene that, under the influence of circularly polarized light, exhibits in its Floquet band structure the distinctive features of a topological insulator, namely a gap in 2D and linear dispersive edge states in 1D (graphene nanoribbon). In particular, we will discuss how these characteristics affect the time behavior of some relevant observables such as energy, charge and current density.