Dynamical Singularities of Floquet Higher-Order Topological Insulators
Haiping Hu, Biao Huang, Erhai Zhao, W. Vincent Liu
Abstract
We propose a versatile framework to dynamically generate Floquet higher-order topological insulators by multistep driving of topologically trivial Hamiltonians. Two analytically solvable examples are used to illustrate this procedure to yield Floquet quadrupole and octupole insulators with zero- and/or π-corner modes protected by mirror symmetries. Furthermore, we introduce dynamical topological invariants from the full unitary return map and show its phase bands contain Weyl singularities whose topological charges form dynamical multipole moments in the Brillouin zone. Combining them with the topological index of a Floquet Hamiltonian gives a pair of Z_{2} invariant ν_{0} and ν_{π} which fully characterize the higher-order topology and predict the appearance of zero- and π-corner modes. Our work establishes a systematic route to construct and characterize Floquet higher-order topological phases.