Floquet Insulators and Lattice Fermions

Floquet insulators are periodically driven quantum systems that can host novel topological phases as a function of the drive parameters. These new phases exhibit features reminiscent of fermion doubling in discrete-time lattice fermion theories. We make this suggestion concrete by mapping the spectrum of a noninteracting (1 + 1)D Floquet insulator for certain drive parameters onto that of a discrete-time lattice fermion theory with a time -independent Hamiltonian. The resulting Hamiltonian is distinct from the Floquet Hamiltonian that generates stroboscopic dynamics. It can take the form of a discrete-time SuSchrieffer-Heeger model with half the number of spatial sites of the original model, or of a (1 + 1)D Wilson-Dirac theory with one quarter of the spatial sites.