Quantum anomalies arise when symmetries of a classical theory cannot be preserved upon quantization, leading to unconventional topological responses. A prominent example is the parity anomaly of a single two-dimensional Dirac fermion, which enforces a half-quantized Hall response. Anomaly inflow mechanism allows this effect to be observed at the surfaces of three-dimensional topological insulators, however, its realization in a genuinely two-dimensional system has remained elusive. Here we report the observation of a parity-anomalous Hall response at the critical point of a quantum Hall topological phase transition in a synthetic two-dimensional system of ultracold dysprosium atoms. By coupling a continuous spatial dimension to a finite synthetic dimension encoded in atomic spin states, we engineer tunable Chern bands with C = 0 and 1. At the transition, the bulk gap closes at a single Dirac point, where we observe a robust half-quantized Hall drift despite strong non-adiabatic excitations. We show that this response originates from the global structure of the band topology, is protected by an emergent parity symmetry at criticality, and disappears when parity is explicitly broken. Our work establishes synthetic quantum systems as a powerful platform to probe quantum anomalies and their interplay with topology and non-equilibrium dynamics.
On the basis of the principle that topological quantum phases arise from the scattering around space-time defects in higher dimensional unification, a geometric model is presented that associates with each quantum phase an element of a transformation group. 1 Introduction Within a physical theory there are often effects or phenomena studied in idealized form in order to gain insight into the peculiarities of the theory. In Quantum Mechanics one such effect is the appearance of topological quantum phases in the wave functions of particles moving freely in multiply connected space-times the prototype of this effect being the Aharonov-Bohm (AB) effect [1], the appearance of a phase factor in the wave function of an electron which moves around a magnetic flux line. A similar effect is the Aharonov-Casher (AC) effect [2] which is obtained from the AB effect by replacing the flux line and the electron by a charged line and a neutral particle with magnetic moment, respectively. There have al...
It is demonstrated that the Aharonov-Casher (AC) phase is a geometric phase that, in general, depends on the details of the closed path taken by a particle with a magnetic moment that is subject to an electric field. Consequently, it is not a topological phase. The proof of this statement is obtained by developing a counterexample that elucidates the dependence of the AC phase on the details of the path. Furthermore, we demonstrate that, in the particular example considered here, paths having an Abelian AC phase factor, also have an AC phase that is path-independent, whereas paths having a non-Abelian AC phase factor may have an AC phase that is path-dependent (i.e., not topological).
The classification of topological phases of matter in the presence of interactions is an area of intense interest. One possible means of classification is via studying the partition function under modular transforms, as the presence of an anomalous phase arising in the edge theory of a
D-dimensional system under modular transformation, or modular anomaly, signals the presence of a
(D+1)-D nontrivial bulk. In this work, we discuss the modular transformations of conformal field theories along a
(2+1)-D and a
(3+1)-D edge. Using both analytical and numerical methods, we show that chiral complex free fermions in
(2+1)-D and
(3+1)-D are modular invariant. However, we show in
(3+1)-D that when the edge theory is coupled to a background
U(1) gauge field, this results in the presence of a modular anomaly that is the manifestation of a quantum Hall effect in a
(4+1)-D bulk. Using the modular anomaly, we find that the edge theory of a
(4+1)-D insulator with space-time inversion symmetry
(PT) and fermion number parity symmetry for each spin becomes modular invariant when eight copies of the edges exist.