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arXiv:1609.00006 · Physical Review X

Chiral Floquet Phases of Many-Body Localized Bosons

Hoi Chun Po, Lukasz Fidkowski, Takahiro Morimoto, Andrew C. Potter, Ashvin Vishwanath

Published Dec 30, 2016• 168 citations

Abstract

We construct and classify chiral topological phases in driven (Floquet) systems of strongly interacting bosons, with finite-dimensional site Hilbert spaces, in two spatial dimensions.The construction proceeds by introducing exactly soluble models with chiral edges, which in the presence of many-body localization (MBL) in the bulk are argued to lead to stable chiral phases.These chiral phases do not require any symmetry and in fact owe their existence to the absence of energy conservation in driven systems.Surprisingly, we show that they are classified by a quantized many-body index, which is well defined for any MBL Floquet system.The value of this index, which is always the logarithm of a positive rational number, can be interpreted as the entropy per Floquet cycle pumped along the edge, formalizing the notion of quantum-information flow.We explicitly compute this index for specific models and show that the nontrivial topology leads to edge thermalization, which provides an interesting link between bulk topology and chaos at the edge.We also discuss chiral Floquet phases in interacting fermionic systems and their relation to chiral bosonic phases.

DOI: 10.1103/physrevx.6.041070

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We construct and classify chiral topological phases in driven (Floquet) systems of strongly interacting bosons, with finite-dimensional site Hilbert spaces, in two spatial dimensions.The construction proceeds by introducing exactly soluble models with chiral edges, which in the presence of many-body localization (MBL) in the bulk are argued to lead to stable chiral phases.These chiral phases do not require any symmetry and in fact owe their existence to the absence of energy conservation in driven systems.Surprisingly, we show that they are classified by a quantized many-body index, which is well defined for any MBL Floquet system.The value of this index, which is always the logarithm of a positive rational number, can be interpreted as the entropy per Floquet cycle pumped along the edge, formalizing the notion of quantum-information flow.We explicitly compute this index for specific models and show that the nontrivial topology leads to edge thermalization, which provides an interesting link between bulk topology and chaos at the edge.We also discuss chiral Floquet phases in interacting fermionic systems and their relation to chiral bosonic phases.

We construct a many-body quantized invariant that sharply distinguishes among two-dimensional nonequilibrium driven phases of interacting fermions. This is an interacting generalization of a band-structure Floquet quasienergy winding number and describes chiral pumping of quantum information along the edge. In particular, our invariant sharply distinguishes between a trivial and anomalous Floquet Anderson insulator in the interacting, many-body localized setting. It also applies more generally to models where only fermion parity is conserved, where it differentiates between trivial models and ones that pump Kitaev Majorana chains to the boundary, such as ones recently introduced in the context of emergent fermions arising from eigenstate

{\mathbb{Z}}_{2}

topological order. We evaluate our invariant for the edge of such a system with eigenstate

{\mathbb{Z}}_{2}

topological order, and show that it is necessarily nonzero when the Floquet unitary exchanges electric and magnetic excitations, proving a connection between bulk anyonic symmetry and edge chirality that was recently conjectured.

Periodically driven noninteracting systems may exhibit anomalous chiral edge modes, despite hosting bands with trivial topology. We find that these drives have surprising many-body analogs, corresponding to class A, which exhibit anomalous charge and information transport at the boundary. Drives of this form are applicable to generic systems of bosons, fermions, and spins, and may be characterized by the anomalous unitary operator that acts at the edge of an open system. We find that these operators are robust to all local perturbations and may be classified by a pair of coprime integers. This defines a notion of dynamical topological order that may be applied to general time-dependent systems, including many-body localized phases or time crystals.

Chiral topological phases, like quantum Hall states, are characterized by anomalous unidirectional edge transport arising from a nontrivial insulating bulk. Recent developments suggest that they can be extended to periodically driven (Floquet) systems, where quantum information is pumped in lieu of charge or energy. The authors uncover a new chiral Floquet phase of quantum dynamics, whose edge pumps quantized units of fractionalized excitations. These phases are ``radical,'' in that the quantum dimension pumped is the square root of an integer. Unexpectedly, such edge borders a bulk with dynamical anyon transmutation, demonstrating a novel form of bulk-boundary correspondence.

Two-dimensional arrays of periodically driven qubits can host inherently dynamical topological phases with anomalous chiral edge dynamics. These chiral Floquet phases are formally characterized by a dynamical topological invariant, the chiral unitary index. Introducing a quantity called the chiral mutual information, we show that this invariant can be precisely interpreted in terms of a quantized chiral transfer of quantum information along the edge of the system, and devise a physical setup to measure it.

Symmetry-protected topological (SPT) phases in insulators and superconductors are known for their robust edge modes, linked to bulk invariants through the bulk-boundary correspondence. While this principle traditionally applies to gapped phases, recent advances have extended it to gapless systems, where topological edge-states persist even in the absence of a bulk gap. We extend this framework to periodically driven chains with chiral symmetry, revealing the existence of topological edge zero and $\ensuremath{\pi}$ modes despite the lack of bulk gaps in the quasienergy spectrum. By examining the half-period decomposition of chiral evolutions, we construct topological invariants that circumvent the need to define the Floquet Hamiltonian, making them more suitable for generalization to the gapless regime. We provide explicit examples, including generalizations of the Kitaev chain and related spin models, where localized $\ensuremath{\pi}$ modes emerge even when the bulk is gapless at the same quasienergy as the edge modes. We numerically study the effect of interactions, which give a finite lifetime to the edge modes in the thermodynamic limit with the decay rate consistent with Fermi's golden rule.

We uncover a new family of few-body topological phases in periodically driven fermionic systems in two dimensions. These phases, which we term correlation-induced anomalous Floquet insulators (CIAFIs), are characterized by quantized contributions to the bulk magnetization from multi-particle correlations, and are classified by a family of integer-valued topological invariants. The CIAFI phases do not require many-body localization, but arise in the generic situation of k-particle localization, where the system is localized (due to disorder) for any finite number of particles up to a maximum number, k. We moreover show that, when fully many-body localized, periodically driven systems of interacting fermions in two dimensions are characterized by a quantized magnetization in the bulk, thus confirming the quantization of magnetization of the anomalous Floquet insulator. We demonstrate our results with numerical simulations.