Entanglement in a Floquet Topological system on a Honeycomb lattice

T. Pereg-Barnea

Karen Wintersperger

This thesis reports on the realization of Floquet topological systems with ultracold atoms in an optical honeycomb lattice. Using periodically driven quantum systems, topological phases of matter can be simulated by an effective, static Hamiltonian related to the time-evolution at integer multiples of the driving period, which is known as Floquet engineering. However, periodic driving can also give rise to genuinely time-dependent settings without static counterparts. One example is the anomalous Floquet phase in two dimensions, in which all bulk bands have a Chern number of zero but nevertheless robust chiral edge modes appear, which would be precluded by the bulk-edge correspondence in a static system. In an optical honeycomb lattice, anomalous Floquet systems can be created by continuous, periodic modulation of the laser intensities. This driving scheme results in different topological regimes, three of which are investigated, including the anomalous Floquet phase and a Haldane-like phase. Periodically driven systems feature periodic quasienergies and can be characterized in terms of winding numbers, which count the number of chiral edge modes in each quasienergy gap. By interferometric measurements of the quasienergy gaps between the first two Floquet bands, the topological phase transitions, emerging as gap closings, are located. For periodically driven systems, a modified bulk-edge correspondence can be formulated. In particular, the change of the winding number at a phase transition is related to the sign change of the local Berry curvature. The Berry curvature at the gap closing points is probed by Hall deflection measurements to obtain the winding numbers in each of the topological regimes, revealing the existence of chiral edge modes also in a setting with smooth boundaries as used in the experiments. The measured quasienergy gaps and transverse deflections are quantitatively well described by a numerical calculation of the Floquet bandstructure that includes coupling to higher bands during the driving period. To derive the spectrum of the modulated lattice in a geometry with edges, a tight-binding description of the system is discussed. Circular phase modulation of the honeycomb lattice can also give rise to an anomalous Floquet system when inversion symmetry is broken. The topological phase diagrams and the experimental feasibility are compared for both modulation schemes. Due to the vanishing Chern numbers, the bulk states in the anomalous Floquet regime can be fully localized by a disorder potential. This could prevent heating in interacting, periodically driven systems, resulting in a many-body localized bulk coexisting with thermalizing edge states. The experimental realization of disorder and strong interactions, as well as independent probes of the edge states are investigated. Bloch band geometry can be extended to multiband systems, using Wilson lines. The possible symmetry protection of their eigenvalues is discussed, along with measurements in the optical honeycomb lattice. Moreover, the onset of heating in weakly-interacting, periodically driven systems, triggered by parametric instabilities, is studied experimentally in a one-dimensional lattice.

Satyaki Kar, Banasri Basu

When irradiated via high-frequency circularly polarized light, the stroboscopic dynamics in a Heisenberg spin system on a honeycomb lattice develops a next-nearest-neighbor (NNN) Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya (DM) type term, making it a magnonic Floquet topological insulator. We investigate the entanglement generation and its evolution on such systems, particularly an irradiated ferromagnetic XXZ spin-$\frac{1}{2}$ model in a honeycomb lattice as the system parameters are optically tuned. In the high-frequency limit, we compute the lowest quasienergy state entanglement in terms of the concurrence between nearest-neighbor (NN) and NNN pair of spins and witness the entanglement transitions occurring there. For the easy-axis scenario, the unirradiated system forms a product state but entanglement grows between the NNN spin pairs beyond some cutoff DM strength. Contrarily in the easy-planar case, NN and NNN spins remain already entangled in the unirradiated limit. It then goes through an entanglement transition which causes decrease (increase) of the NN (NNN) concurrences down to zero (up to some higher value) at some critical finite DM interaction strength. For a high frequency of irradiation and a suitably chosen anisotropy parameter, we can vary the field strength to witness sudden death and revival of entanglement in the Floquet system. Both exact diagonalization and modified Lanczos techniques are used to obtain the results up to 24 site lattice. We also calculate the thermal entanglement and obtain estimates for the threshold temperatures below which nonzero concurrence can be expected in the system.

Siyuan Cheng, Rui Xie, Xiaosen Yang +2 more

Elizabeth Noelle Blose

Yiqi Zhang, Zhenkun Wu, Milivoj R. Belić +4 more

The feasibility of realizing a photonic Floquet topological insulator (PFTI) in an atomic ensemble is demonstrated. The interference of three coupling fields will split energy levels periodically, to form a periodic refractive index structure with honeycomb profile that can be adjusted by different frequency detunings and intensities of the coupling fields. This in turn will affect the appearance of Dirac cones in momentum space. When the honeycomb lattice sites are helically ordered along the propagation direction, gaps open at Dirac points, and one obtains a PFTI in an atomic vapor. An obliquely incident beam will be able to move along the zigzag edge of the lattice without scattering energy into the PFTI, due to the confinement of edge states. The appearance of Dirac cones and the formation of a photonic Floquet topological insulator can be shut down by the third-order nonlinear susceptibility and opened up by the fifth-order one.