Generalised many body topological invariant and the unitary preparation of Chern insulators: An emergent bulk-boundary correspondence
Souvik Kumar Bandyopadhyay, Amit Dutta
Abstract
Building on the non-uniqueness of the macroscopic electric polarisation in the topological phase of a Chern insulator, we construct a many body Chern invariant. Under a smooth unitary temporal evolution, this quantity evolves with time and successfully reflects the topology of the out-of-equilibrium state of the system by assuming an integer-quantised value in the adiabatic limit. Considering a linear ramping of the staggered Semenoff mass of the paradigmatic Haldane model of graphene, we illustrate that starting from a trivial state, it is indeed possible to obtain a topologically non-trivial state even by an adiabatic unitary driving protocol. We further propose a counter-diabatic protocol that enables us to suppress the otherwise inevitable diabatic excitations generated while crossing the gapless quantum critical point. Notably, the corresponding emergence of an edge current in the final evolved state of the model under a semi-periodic boundary condition necessitates the application of a novel counter-diabatic field manifested as anisotropic hopping in the real space Hamiltonian. The generalised topology of this dynamical Chern invariant takes into account the dynamical occupation of instantaneous single-particle bands, and consequently ensconces an emergent bulk-boundary correspondence that is expected to manifest in experiments.