Noise resilience of two-dimensional Floquet topological phases

Abstract

We study the effect of noise on two-dimensional periodically driven topological phases, focusing on two examples: the anomalous Floquet-Anderson phase and the disordered Floquet-Chern phase. Both phases show an unexpected robustness against timing noise. The noise-induced decay of initially populated topological edge modes occurs in two stages: At short times, thermalization among edge modes leads to exponential decay. This is followed by slow algebraic decay $\sim n^{-1/2}$ with the number of Floquet cycles $n$. The exponent of $1/2$ is characteristic for one-dimensional diffusion, here occurring along the direction perpendicular to the edge. In contrast, localized modes in the bulk exhibit faster decay, $\sim n^{-1}$, corresponding to two-dimensional diffusion. We demonstrate these behaviors through full-scale numerical simulations and support our conclusions using analytical results based upon a phenomenological model. Our findings indicate that two-dimensional Floquet topological phases are ideal candidates for potential applications of Floquet topology, given the unavoidable presence of both quenched disorder and decoherence in experiments.