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Fundamental limitations and design of effective Hamiltonians in driven lattices

Albert Verdeny, Florian Mintert

Published Feb 25, 2015• 0 citations
OpenAlex

Abstract

Driven lattices permit the engineering of effective Hamiltonians with well-controllable tunneling properties. We discuss the design of such effective Hamiltonians and identify fundamental constraints imposed by the underlying lattice geometry. With the specific example of a hexagonal lattice we show how suitably chosen driving forces allow the realization of non-trivial topological phases and overcome limitations of monochromatic driving.

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Driven optical lattices permit the engineering of effective dynamics with well-controllable tunneling properties. By specifically designing polychromatic driving forces, we describe how an optimal realization of a tunable Chern insulator can be achieved with a system of interacting particles on a shaken hexagonal lattice. Its implementation does not require shallow lattices and favors the study of strongly correlated phases with nontrivial topology.

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Driven lattices permit the engineering of effective Hamiltonians with well-controllable tunneling properties. We discuss the design of such effective Hamiltonians and identify fundamental constraints imposed by the underlying lattice geometry. With the specific example of a hexagonal lattice we show how suitably chosen driving forces allow the realization of non-trivial topological phases and overcome limitations of monochromatic driving.
Periodically driven quantum systems offer an exceptional platform for quantum simulations due to the possibility to approximate their dynamics in terms of time-independent effective Hamiltonians. This, together with the recent experimental advances, has situated driven systems at center stage of engineered quantum-mechanical devices. The aim of this thesis is to develop theoretical methods in order to design optimal quantum simulations with driven systems. By applying the derived tools to experimentally relevant models, the applicability and significance of the methods are furthermore demonstrated. First, we introduce a method to derive accurate effective Hamiltonians by merging two seemingly unrelated tools: Floquet theory and flow equations. With this, the required analytical identification of the effective Hamiltonian in terms of the system's parameters is achieved. Second, we identify structural properties that determine the accessible effective dynamics of a system of particles on shaken optical lattices, which is arguably one of the most remarkable systems for many-body quantum simulations. In particular, we identify fundamental symmetries of the underlying lattice geometry that determine the emergence of new tunneling processes. Third, we develop an optimal control scheme to design polychromatic driving protocols that optimally simulate specifically targeted dynamics. We apply this scheme to demonstrate an optimal realization of Raman transitions with a Lambda system, a building block in many quantum simulations. Then, we employ it to implement a topological Chern insulator through suitably engineering the geometry-dependent tunneling of particles on a shaken hexagonal lattice. Hereby, a realistic route to experimentally test strongly-correlated topological phases of matter is provided. By determining structural properties of driven systems and suitable driving protocols, the methods described in this thesis open substantial possibilities for the development of optimal quantum simulations and, ultimately, reliable quantum technologies.
We present a direct comparison between the stroboscopic and nonstroboscopic effective approaches for ultracold atoms in shaken honeycomb lattices, focusing specifically on the optimal driving introduced by A. Verdeny and F. Mintert []. In the fast-driving regime, we compare the effective nonstroboscopic Hamiltonian derived through a perturbative expansion with a nonperturbative calculation of the stroboscopic Floquet Hamiltonian, obtained through a direct numerical approach. We find that the leading off-diagonal tunneling coefficients, which define the undriven model, retain their isotropic nature under the effect of the driving, and their values are independent of the computational approach used. This consistency ensures the robustness of certain topological properties, such as the position of Dirac points, as expected. Conversely, the next-to-leading diagonal tunneling coefficients, generated dynamically, can vary across different approaches without affecting the system topology. This suggests that the topological phase diagram is most conveniently represented in terms of the physical parameters characterizing the driving and directly accessible in experiments, rather than in terms of the tunneling parameters. Published by the American Physical Society 2024
Shaken optical lattices permit the coherent modification of tunneling of particles in a controllable manner. We introduce a general relation between the geometry of shaken lattices and their admissible effective dynamics. By using three different examples, we illustrate the symmetries of the emerging tunneling rates. The results provide a clear framework to understand the relation between lattice geometry and accessible dynamics, and a tool to straightforwardly derive truncated effective Hamiltonians on arbitrary geometries.
Mixed pairing in ultracold Fermi gases can give rise to interesting many-body phases, such as topological nontrivial superfluids that support Majorana zero modes (MZMs) with various spatial configurations. Unfortunately, in ordinary lattice systems, the topological phase and the associated MZMs are suppressed by the dominant sss-wave pairing. Here we present a proposal for engineering effective Hamiltonians with tunable mixed on- and off-site pairing based on driven optical lattices. The on- and off-site pairing can be changed independently by means of a periodical driving field rather than magnetic Feshbach resonances. It paves the way for suppressing the dominant on-site interaction that frustrates the emergence of topological superfluids and for synthesizing MZMs localized in edges or corners.
Topological phases of matter provide a flexible platform to engineer unconventional quantum excitations in quantum materials. Beyond single particle topological matter, in systems with strong quantum many-body correlations, many-body effects can be the driving force for non-trivial topology. Here, we propose a one-dimensional engineered Kondo lattice where the emergence of topological excitations is driven by collective many-body Kondo physics. We first show the existence of topological zero modes in this system by solving the interacting model with tensor networks, and demonstrate their robustness against disorder. To unveil the origin of the topological zero modes, we analyze the associated periodic Anderson model showing that it can be mapped to a topological non-Hermitian model, enabling rationalizing the origin of the topological zero modes. We finally show that the topological invariant of the many-body Kondo lattice can be computed with a correlation matrix pumping method directly with the exact quantum many-body wave function. Our results provide a strategy to engineer topological Kondo insulators, highlighting quantum magnetism as a driving force in engineering topological matter.