Hernán L. Calvo,¹ and Matias Berdakin^2,3

¹Instituto de Física Enrique Gaviola (CONICET) and FaMAF, Universidad Nacional de Córdoba, Argentina
²INFIQC (CONICET-UNC), Ciudad Universitaria, Córdoba, Argentina
³Departamento de Química Teórica y Computacional, Fac. de Ciencias Químicas, UNC, Argentina

Manipulating the properties of materials on demand is one of the main goals of chemists and condensed matter physicists. Strong coupling with light is a versatile tool for dressing systems with new properties since the electron-photon interaction achieved by irradiation with strong laser fields produces hybrid Floquet-Bloch states [1] that open new ways to tune the electronic structure of materials. On the other hand, twisting 2D monolayers (TM) is another way of tuning material properties. The interaction between the usual Bloch phase and the resulting space-dependent Moiré potential provides a new modulation to the tunneling between layers that can drastically change the electronic properties of multilayers [2].
In light of this context, we pose the following question: Can the spatially dependent Moiré pattern that results in novel TM features be mapped to a spatially dependent electron-photon interaction in the Floquet-Bloch Hamiltonian? In this talk, we show that this is indeed possible. Starting with a graphene nanoribbon, we show that the irradiation with two lasers tilted along the same axis generates an interference pattern leading to a quasi-1D supercell with a spatially dependent vector potential. This produces a network of Floquet topological states and the appearance of photocurrents.

References:
[1] F. Mahmood, C.-K. Chan, Z. Alpichshev, D. Gardner, Y. Lee, P. A. Lee, and N. Gedik, Selective scattering between Floquet-Bloch and Volkov states in a topological insulator, Nature Phys 12, 306 (2016).
[2] E. Y. Andrei and A. H. MacDonald, Graphene bilayers with a twist, Nat. Mater. 19, 1265 (2020).