Floquet engineering of exotic topological phases in systems of cold atoms

Abstract

Topological phases with a widely tunable number of edge modes have been extensively studied as a typical class of exotic states of matter with potentially important applications. Although several models have been shown to support such phases, they are not easy to realize in solid-state systems due to the complexity of various intervening factors. Inspired by the realization of synthetic spin-orbit coupling in a cold-atom system [Z. Wu et al., Science 354, 83 (2016)], we propose a periodic quenching scheme to realize large-topological-number phases with multiple edge modes in optical lattices. Via introducing the periodic quenching to the Raman lattice, it is found that a large number of edge modes can be induced in a controllable manner from the static topologically trivial system. Our result provides an experimentally accessible method to artificially synthesize and manipulate exotic topological phases with large topological numbers and multiple edge modes.