Manifestation of a topological gapless phase in a two-dimensional chiral symmetric system through Loschmidt echo

Abstract

Unlike the edge state of a topological insulator where its energy level lives in the bulk energy gap, the edge state of a topological semimetal hides in the bulk spectrum and is difficult to be identified by the energy. We investigate the sensitivity of bulk and edge states of the gapless phase for a topological semimetal to the disordered perturbation via a concrete two-dimensional chiral symmetric lattice model. The topological gapless phase is characterized by two opposite vortices in the momentum space and nonzero winding numbers, which correspond to the edge flatband when the open boundary condition is applied. For this system, numerical results reveal that a distinguishing feature is that the robustness of the edge states against weak disorder and the flatband edge modes remain locked at zero energy in the presence of weak chiral-symmetry-preserving disorder. We employ the Loschmidt echo (LE) for both bulk and edge states to study the dynamic effect of disordered perturbation. We show that, for an initial bulk state, the LE decays exponentially, whereas it converges to a constant for an initial edge state in the presence of weak disorder. Furthermore, the convergent LE can be utilized to identify the positions of vortices as well as the phase diagram. We discuss the realization of such dynamic investigations in a topological photonic system.