Topological Thouless pumping of ultracold fermions

By S. Nakajima, T. Tomita, S. Taie, T. Ichinose, H. Ozawa, Lei Wang, Matthias Troyer, Y. Takahashi. Nature Physics, 2015

605 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Charge transport in a cyclically time-modulated periodic potential, also known as a topological Thouless pump, has been realized in an ultracold gas of fermionic atoms. An electron gas in a one-dimensional periodic potential can be transported even in the absence of a voltage bias if the potential is slowly and periodically modulated in time. Remarkably, the transferred charge per cycle is sensitive only to the topology of the path in parameter space. Although this so-called Thouless charge pump was first proposed more than thirty years ago1, it has not yet been realized. Here we report the demonstration of topological Thouless pumping using ultracold fermionic atoms in a dynamically controlled optical superlattice. We observe a shift of the atomic cloud as a result of pumping, and extract the topological invariance of the pumping process from this shift. We demonstrate the topological nature of the Thouless pump by varying the topology of the pumping path and verify that the topological pump indeed works in the quantum regime by varying the speed and temperature.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/efdc9a865353665eb62b51f6b8b913cadc314a2a

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Citations in the corpus

Interplay of non-Hermitian skin effects and Anderson localization in nonreciprocal quasiperiodic lattices (2019, background): “[27] Shuta Nakajima, Takafumi Tomita, Shintaro Taie, Tomohiro Ichinose, Hideki Ozawa, Lei Wang, Matthias Troyer, and Yoshiro Takahashi.”
Quantum simulation of the Hubbard model with ultracold fermions in optical lattices (2018, neutral): “Finally, other promising directions for future research include the study of out-of-equilibrium dynamics in this system [174,111,175,176], and the interplay of strong correlations with disorder [81,177,178] and topology [179,180,181,182].”
Symmetry and Topology in Non-Hermitian Physics (2018, background): “[201] S.”
Artificial gauge fields in materials and engineered systems (2017, positive): “These ideas have been successfully realized in photonic systems [175,176,177] and ultracold atoms [178,179,180,181], and recently enabled studies of 4D quantum Hall physics based on 2D topological pumping [182,183].”
Topological photonics (2018, background): “Similar to the aforementioned cold-atom experiments (Lohse et al., 2016; Nakajima et al., 2016) theoretical proposals have addressed the possibility of studying quantized bulk pumping in photonic systems (Mei et al., 2015; Ke et al., 2016).”
Topological characterizations of an extended Su–Schrieffer–Heeger model (2019, neutral): “[27] Nakajima, S.”