  Two-dimensional (2D) semi-Dirac materials are characterized by a quadratic
dispersion in one direction and a linear dispersion along the orthogonal
direction. We study the topological phase transition in such 2D systems in the
presence of an electromagnetic field. We show that a Chern insulating state
emerges in a semi-Dirac system with two gapless Dirac nodes in the presence of
light. In particular, we show that the intensity of a circularly polarized
light can be used as a knob to generate topological states with nonzero Chern
number. In addition, for fixed intensity and frequency of the light, a
semi-Dirac system with two gapped Dirac nodes with trivial band topology can
reveal the topological transition as a function of polarization of the light.
