Second-order topological insulator in periodically driven optical lattices

Generating Many Majorana Corner Modes and Multiple Phase Transitions in Floquet Second-Order Topological Superconductors

A d-dimensional, nth-order topological insulator or superconductor has localized eigenmodes at its (d−n)-dimensional boundaries (n≤d). In this work, we apply periodic driving fields to two-dimensional superconductors, and obtain a wide variety of Floquet second-order topological superconducting (SOTSC) phases with many Majorana corner modes at both zero and π quasienergies. Two distinct Floquet SOTSC phases are found to be separated by three possible kinds of transformations, i.e., a topological phase transition due to the closing/reopening of a bulk spectral gap, a topological phase transition due to the closing/reopening of an edge spectral gap, or an entirely different phase in which the bulk spectrum is gapless. Thanks to the strong interplay between driving and intrinsic energy scales of the system, all the found phases and transitions are highly controllable via tuning a single hopping parameter of the system. Our discovery not only enriches the possible forms of Floquet SOTSC phases, but also offers an efficient scheme to generate many coexisting Majorana zero and π corner modes, which may find applications in Floquet quantum computation.