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Noise resilience of two-dimensional Floquet topological phases

Balaganchi A. Bhargava1,2, Sanjib Kumar Das1,3,4,*, Lukas M. Sieberer5, and Ion Cosma Fulga1

  • *Contact author: i.c.fulga@ifw-dresden.de
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Phys. Rev. B 112, 235416 – Published 16 December, 2025

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/p437-xlcn

Abstract

We study the effect of noise on two-dimensional periodically driven topological phases, focusing on two examples: the anomalous Floquet-Anderson phase and the disordered Floquet-Chern phase. Both phases show an unexpected robustness against timing noise. The noise-induced decay of initially populated topological edge modes occurs in two stages: At short times, thermalization among edge modes leads to exponential decay. This is followed by slow algebraic decay ∼n−1/2 with the number of Floquet cycles n. The exponent of 1/2 is characteristic for one-dimensional diffusion, here occurring along the direction perpendicular to the edge. In contrast, localized modes in the bulk exhibit faster decay, ∼n−1, corresponding to two-dimensional diffusion. We demonstrate these behaviors through full-scale numerical simulations and support our conclusions using analytical results based upon a phenomenological model. Our findings indicate that two-dimensional Floquet topological phases are ideal candidates for potential applications of Floquet topology, given the unavoidable presence of both quenched disorder and decoherence in experiments.

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Phys. Rev. B 112, 235416– Published 16 December, 2025
  • Received 4 September 2025
  • Revised 18 November 2025
  • Accepted 24 November 2025
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