Abstract Wepropose a scheme realizing topological insulators and quantized pumps for magnon excitations, based on strongly-interacting two-component ultracold atoms trapped in optical superlattices. Specifically, we show how to engineer the Su–Schrieffer–Heeger model for magnons using state-independent superlattices, and the Rice-Mele model using state-dependent superlattices. We describe realistic experimental protocols to detect the topological signatures of magnon excitations in these two models. In particular, we show that the non-equilibrium dynamics of a single magnon can be exploited to directly detect topological winding numbers and phase transitions. We also describe how topological (quantized) pumps can be realized with magnons, and study how this phenomenon depends on the initial magnon state preparation. Our study opens a new avenue for exploring magnonic topological phases of matter and their potential applications in the context of topological magnon transport.
Topological pumping of ultracold atomic gases has recently been demonstrated in two experiments (Nat. Phys. 12, 296; 12, 350 (2016)). Here we study the topological pumping of a single magnon in a dynamically controlled spin-dependent optical superlattice. When the interaction between atoms is strong, this system supports a dynamical version of topological magnon insulator phase. By initially putting a single magnon in the superlattice and slowly varying the dynamical controlled parameter over one period, the shift of the magnon density center is quantized and equal to the topological Chern number. Moreover, we also find that the direction of this quantized shift is entanglement-dependent. Our result provides a route for realizing topological pumping of quasiparticles in strongly correlated ultracold atomic system and for studying the interplay between topological pumping and quantum entanglement.
Experiments with bosonic atoms in optical superlattices allow for the interesting possibility to study the adiabatic quantized pumping of bosonic atoms in the presence of interactions. We investigate this exotic phenomenon for bound bosonic pairs in the paradigmatic Su-Schrieffer-Heeger model where the ground state exhibits topological properties due to dimerized hoppings. We show that at unit filling there exist crossovers and phase transitions to bond-order phases of paired bosons known as the pair-bond-order phase for attractive interactions. The pair-bond-order phase is found to exhibit effective topological properties such as the presence of polarized paired edge states. This is further analyzed by studying the emergence and breakdown of the Thouless charge pumping of bound bosonic pairs by a parametric extension to the famous Rice-Mele model. Finally, we discuss how the pumping of paired bosons or different regimes of breakdown of charge pumping can be probed by state-of-the-art experiments, for example, with repulsively bound bosons.
Topological insulators have inspired the study with various quantum simulators. Exploiting the tunability of the qubit frequency and qubit-qubit coupling, we show that a superconducting qubit chain can simulate various topological band models. When the system is restricted to the single-spin excitation subspace, the Su-Schrieffer-Heeger (SSH) model can be equivalently simulated by alternating the coupling strength between neighboring qubits. The existence of topological edge states in this qubit chain is demonstrated in the quench dynamics after the first qubit is excited. This excitation propagates along the chain where the qubit-qubit coupling is homogeneous. In contrast, in our qubit chain, the spin-up state localizes at the first qubit and the rest qubits remain in the spin-down state. We further show that the spin-up state can be transported along the chain by modulating the coupling strengths and the qubit frequencies. This demonstrates adiabatic pumping based on the Rice-Mele model. Moreover, we also discuss possible ways to construct other topological models with different topological phenomena within the current technology of superconducting qubits.
In nonlinear topological physics, Thouless pumping of nonlinear excitations is a central topic, often illustrated by scalar solitons. Vector solitons, with the additional spin degree of freedom, exhibit phenomena absent in scalar solitons due to the enriched interplay between nonlinearity and topology. Here, we theoretically investigate Thouless pumping of vector solitons in a two-component Bose-Einstein condensate confined in spin-dependent optical superlattices, using both numerical solutions of the Gross-Pitaevskii equation and the Lagrangian variational approach. The spin-up and spin-down components experience superlattice potentials that are displaced by a tunable distance
dr, leading to a vector soliton state with a relative shift between its components. We demonstrate that
dr, as an independent degree of freedom, offers a novel control parameter for manipulating the nonlinear topological phase transition of vector solitons. Specifically, when
dr=0, both components are either pumped or arrested, depending on the interaction strength. When fixing the interaction strength and varying
dr, remarkably, we find that an arrested vector soliton can reenter the pumped regime and exhibits a quantized shift. As
dr continues to increase, the vector soliton transitions into a dynamically arrested state; however, with further increases in
dr, the quantized shift revives. Our work paves new routes for engineering nonlinear topological pumping of solitons in spinor systems by utilizing the relative motion degrees of freedom between different spin components.
This is an introductory review of the physics of topological quantum matter with cold atoms. Topological quantum phases, originally discovered and investigated in condensed matter physics, have recently been explored in a range of different systems, which produced both fascinating physics findings and exciting opportunities for applications. Among the physical systems that have been considered to realize and probe these intriguing phases, ultracold atoms become promising platforms due to their high flexibility and controllability. Quantum simulation of topological phases with cold atomic gases is a rapidly evolving field, and recent theoretical and experimental developments reveal that some toy models originally proposed in condensed matter physics have been realized with this artificial quantum system. The purpose of this article is to introduce these developments. The article begins with a tutorial review of topological invariants and the methods to control parameters in the Hamiltonians of neutral atoms. Next, topological quantum phases in optical lattices are introduced in some detail, especially several celebrated models, such as the Su–Schrieffer–Heeger model, the Hofstadter–Harper model, the Haldane model and the Kane–Mele model. The theoretical proposals and experimental implementations of these models are discussed. Notably, many of these models cannot be directly realized in conventional solid-state experiments. The newly developed methods for probing the intrinsic properties of the topological phases in cold-atom systems are also reviewed. Finally, some topological phases with cold atoms in the continuum and in the presence of interactions are discussed, and an outlook on future work is given.
We study the topological properties of an extended Bose-Hubbard model with cyclically modulated hopping and on-site potential parameters, which can be realized with ultracold bosonic atoms in a one-dimensional optical superlattice. We show that the interacting bosonic chain at half filling and in the deep Mott insulating regime can simulate bosonic Chern insulators with a topological phase diagram similar to that of the Haldane model of noninteracting fermions. Furthermore, we explore the topological properties of the ground state by calculating the many-body Chern number, the quasiparticle energy spectrum with gapless edge modes, the topological pumping of the interacting bosons, and the topological phase transition from normal (trivial) to topological Mott insulators. We also present the global phase diagram of the many-body ground state, which contains a superfluid phase and two Mott insulating phases with trivial (a zero Chern number) and nontrivial topologies (a nonzero Chern number), respectively.