Creating stable Floquet-Weyl semimetals by laser-driving of 3D Dirac materials

Understand

Tuning and stabilising topological states, such as Weyl semimetals, Dirac semimetals, or topological insulators, is emerging as one of the major topics in materials science.

• Periodic driving of many-body systems offers a platform to design Floquet states of matter with tunable electronic properties on ultrafast time scales.
• Here we show by first principles calculations how femtosecond laser pulses with circularly polarised light can be used to switch between Weyl semimetal, Dirac semimetal, and topological insulator states in a prototypical 3D Dirac material, Na$_3$Bi.
• Our findings are general and apply to any 3D Dirac semimetal.