Conventional wisdom would suggest that a phase of matter can only be sensibly defined in a many-body system at equilibrium. However, in recent years, it has been shown that quantum many-body systems subjected to strong periodic drives can in fact realize novel phases of matter, rather than trivially heating up to infinite temperature. In this talk, I will discuss how such periodically driven, or Floquet, systems can support chiral topological phases without equilibrium analogues. After building some intuition with free fermion models, which can be characterized using band theory techniques, I will discuss interacting bosonic topological Floquet phases, which transport quantum information along their edges and exhibit a classification based on rational numbers.
The Zoom link will be sent to the Graduate Student and PDRA mailing lists. If you are not on one of those lists and are interested in attending, please email Mark Hirsbrunner at hrsbrnn2@illinois.edu for the link.
