Topological Floquet-bands in a circularly shaken dice lattice

Abstract: The hoppings of non-interacting particles in the optical dice lattice result in the gapless dispersions in the band structure formed by the three lowest minibands. In our research, we find that once a periodic driving force is applied to this optical dice lattice, the original spectral characteristics could be changed, forming three gapped quasi-energy bands in the quasi-energy Brillouin zone. The topological phase diagram containing the Chern number of the lowest quasi-energy band shows that when the hopping strengths of the nearest-neighboring hoppings are isotropic, the system persists in the topologically non-trivial phases with Chern number $C=2$ within a wide range of the driving strength. Accompanied by the anisotropic nearest-neighboring hopping strengths, a topological phase transition occurs, making Chern number change from $C=2$ to $C=1$. This transition is further verified by our analytical method. Our theoretical work implies that it is feasible to realize the non-trivially topological characteristics of optical dice lattices by applying the periodic shaking, and that topological phase transition can be observed by independently tuning the strength of a type of nearest-neighbor hopping.