Chiral symmetry and bulk-boundary correspondence in periodically driven one-dimensional systems

Abstract

Over the past few years, topological insulators have taken center stage in solid state physics. The desire to tune the topological invariants of the bulk and thus control the number of edge states has steered theorists and experimentalists towards periodically driving parameters of these systems. In such periodically driven setups, by varying the drive sequence the effective (Floquet) Hamiltonian can be engineered to be topological: then, the principle of bulk--boundary correspondence guarantees the existence of robust edge states. It has also been realized, however, that periodically driven systems can host edge states not predicted by the Floquet Hamiltonian. The exploration of such edge states, and the corresponding topological phases unique to periodically driven systems, has only recently begun. We contribute to this goal by identifying the bulk topological invariants of periodically driven one-dimensional lattice Hamiltonians with chiral symmetry. We find simple closed expressions for these invariants, as winding numbers of blocks of the unitary operator corresponding to a part of the time evolution, and ways to tune these invariants using sublattice shifts. We illustrate our ideas on the periodically driven Su-Schrieffer-Heeger model, which we map to a discrete time quantum walk, allowing theoretical results about either of these systems to be applied to the other. Our work helps interpret the results of recent simulations where a large number of Floquet Majorana fermions in periodically driven superconductors have been found, and of recent experiments on discrete time quantum walks.