Observation of a dynamical topological phase transition

By Nick Flaschner, D. Vogel, M. Tarnowski, B. Rem, Dirk-Soren Luhmann, Markus Heyl, J. C. Budich, L. Mathey, Klaus Sengstock, C. Weitenberg. 2016

236 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Phase transitions are a fundamental concept in science describing diverse phenomena ranging from, e.g., the freezing of water to Bose-Einstein condensation. While the concept is well-established in equilibrium, similarly fundamental concepts for systems far from equilibrium are just being explored, such as the recently introduced dynamical phase transition (DPT). Here we report on the first observation of a DPT in the dynamics of a fermionic many-body state after a quench between two lattice Hamiltonians. With time-resolved state tomography in a system of ultracold atoms in optical lattices, we obtain full access to the evolution of the wave function. We observe the appearance, movement, and annihilation of vortices in reciprocal space. We identify their number as a dynamical topological order parameter, which suddenly changes its value at the critical times of the DPT. Our observation of a DPT is an important step towards a more comprehensive understanding of non-equilibrium dynamics in general.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/826e27d048d11c762fae48af137e61f086cf58ac

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In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

1. Nathan Goldman
2. A. Amo
3. T. Ozawa
4. H. Price
5. M. Rechtsman
6. I. Carusotto
7. David I. Schuster
8. Jonathan Simon

Citations in the corpus

• Topological bands for ultracold atoms (2018, unknown): “Here the reconstructed Berry curvature leads to a value of C compatible with 0 (Fläschner et al., 2016).”
• Topological photonics (2018, background): “, 2011; Oka and Aoki, 2009) to ultracold atoms in shaken optical lattices (Eckardt, 2016; Fläschner et al., 2016; Jotzu et al., 2014), but it was in fact pioneered in photonic experiments using femtosecond-laser-written lattices (Rechtsman et al.”