Eur. Phys. J. B (2016) 89: 216
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjb/e2016-70265-5

Regular Article

Dynamical merging of Dirac points in the periodically driven Kitaev honeycomb model

¹ Department of Physics, Indian Institute of Technology, 208016 Kanpur, India
² Department of Physics and Astronomy, The Johns Hopkins University, 3400 N. Charles Street, Baltimore MD 21218, USA

^a e-mail: dutta@iitk.ac.in

Received: 2 May 2016
Received in final form: 27 July 2016
Published online: 5 October 2016

Abstract

We study the effect of a half wave rectified sinusoidal electromagnetic (EM) wave on the Kitaev honeycomb model with an additional magneto-electric coupling term arising due to induced polarization of the bonds. Within the framework of Floquet analysis, we show that merging of a pair of Dirac points in the gapless region of the Kitaev model leading to a semi-Dirac spectrum is indeed possible by externally varying the amplitude and the phase of the EM field.