Topological signatures in the quench dynamics of periodically driven quantum systems

Abstract

We study the quench dynamics of graphene, without and with a staggered mass, following the sudden switch-on of circularly polarized light where coupling to a fermionic bath is also considered. Using an armchair nanoribbon, we compute the period-averaged bond current near the edge at successive stroboscopic times. For the isolated system, the current oscillates around a dc value which, we analytically show, equals the Floquet band currents weighted by their projected occupations; a nonzero dc current signals an induced topological phase. When coupled to a bath with a finite coupling, the current and conductance initially increase and then saturate, indicating a nonequilibrium steady state. In the limit of vanishingly small coupling, the period-averaged conductance becomes quantized after summing over bath chemical potentials shifted by integer multiples of the driving frequency, revealing the number of edge modes crossing the zero-quasienergy gap and the Floquet zone boundary gap. We support these results by computing the two-terminal conductance of a finite-size tight-binding model under a three-step driving protocol; the bond conductance after applying the sum rule corroborates our findings.