Driven electronic states at the surface of a topological insulator

Abstract

Motivated by recent photoemission experiments on the surface of topological insulators we compute the spectrum of driven topological surface excitations in the presence of an external light source. We completely characterize the spectral function of these nonequilibrium electron excitations for both linear and circular polarizations of the incident light. We find that in the latter case, the circularly polarized light gaps out the surface states, whereas linear polarization gives rise to an anisotropic metal with multiple Dirac cones. We compare the sizes of the gaps with recent pump-probe photoemission measurements and find good agreement. We also identify theoretically several new features in the time-dependent spectral function, such as shadow Dirac cones.