Floquet second order topological superconductor based on unconventional pairing

We theoretically investigate the Floquet generation of second-order topological superconducting (SOTSC) phase in the high-temperature platform both in two dimension (2D) and three dimension (3D). Starting from a d-wave superconducting pairing gap, we periodically kick the mass term to engineer the dynamical SOTSC phase within a specific range of the strength of the drive. Under such dynamical breaking of time-reversal symmetry (TRS), we show the emergence of the weak SOTSC phase, harboring eight corner modes, i.e., two zero-energy Majorana per corner, with vanishing Floquet quadrupole moment. On the other hand, our study interestingly indicates that upon the introduction of an explicit TRS breaking Zeeman field, the weak SOTSC phase can be transformed into strong SOTSC phase, hosting one zero-energy Majorana mode per corner, with quantized quadrupole moment. We also compute the Floquet Wannier spectra that further establishes the weak and strong nature of these phases. We numerically verify our protocol computing the exact Floquet operator in open boundary condition and then analytically validate our findings with the low energy effective theory (in the high-frequency limit). The above protocol is applicable for 3D as well as where we find one dimensional (1D) hinge mode in the SOTSC phase. We then show that these corner modes are robust against moderate disorder and the topological invariants continue to exhibit quantized nature until disorder becomes substantially strong. The existence of zero-energy Majorana modes in these higher-order phases is guaranteed by the antiunitary spectral symmetry.

Automated summary

We theoretically investigate the Floquet generation of second-order topological superconducting phase in both 2D and 3D high-temperature platforms, revealing a transition between weak and strong SOTSC phases. Numerical and analytical validation confirms the existence of these phases and demonstrates the robustness of corner modes against moderate disorder.