Anomalous Levitation and Annihilation in Floquet Topological Insulators

Anderson localization in two-dimensional topological insulators takes place via the so-called levitation and pair annihilation process. As disorder is increased, extended bulk states carrying opposite topological invariants move towards each other in energy, reducing the size of the topological gap, eventually meeting and localizing. This results in a topologically trivial Anderson insulator. Here, we introduce the anomalous levitation and pair annihilation, a process unique to periodically driven, or Floquet, systems. Due to the periodicity of the quasienergy spectrum, we find it is possible for the topological gap to increase as a function of disorder strength. Thus, after all bulk states have localized, the system remains topologically nontrivial, forming an anomalous Floquet-Anderson insulator (AFAI) phase. We show a concrete example for this process, adding disorder via on-site potential “kicks” to a Chern insulator model. By changing the period between kicks, we can tune which type of (conventional or anomalous) levitation and annihilation occurs in the system. We expect our results to be applicable to generic Floquet topological systems and to provide an accessible way to realize AFAIs experimentally, without the need for multistep driving schemes.