Disorder-induced Floquet topological insulators

Abstract

We investigate the possibility of realizing a disorder-induced topological Floquet spectrum in two-dimensional periodically driven systems. Such a state would be a dynamical realization of the topological Anderson insulator. We establish that a disorder-induced trivial-to-topological transition indeed occurs, and characterize it by computing the disorder averaged Bott index, suitably defined for the time-dependent system. The presence of edge states in the topological state is confirmed by exact numerical time evolution of wave packets on the edge of the system. We consider the optimal driving regime for experimentally observing the Floquet topological Anderson insulator, and discuss its possible realization in photonic lattices.