Dynamically Induced Symmetry Breaking and Out-of-Equilibrium Topology in a 1D Quantum System

Published

September 16, 2022

Author(s)

Ian Spielman, Graham Reid, Alina Pineiro Escalera, Amilson R. Fritsch, Mingwu Lu

Abstract

Nontrivial topology in lattices is characterized by invariants---such as the Zak phase for one-dimensional (1D) lattices---derived from wave functions covering the Brillouin zone. We realized the 1D bipartite Rice--Mele (RM) lattice using ultracold 87-Rb and focus on lattice configurations possessing various combinations of chiral, time-reversal and particle-hole symmetries. We quenched between configurations and used a form of quantum state tomography, enabled by diabatically tuning lattice parameters, to directly follow the time evolution of the Zak phase as well as a chiral winding number. The Zak phase evolves continuously; however, when chiral symmetry transiently appears in the out-of-equilibrium system, the chiral winding number is well defined and can take on different integer values. When quenching between two configurations obeying all three symmetries the Zak phase is time independent; we confirm the contrasting prediction of [M. McGinley and N. R.Cooper, PRL 121 090401 (2018)] that chiral symmetry is periodically restored, at which times the winding number changes by ±2, yielding values that are not present in the native RM Hamiltonian.

Citation

Physical Review Letters

Pub Type

Journals

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Keywords

Quantum topology, dynamically induced symmetry breaking

Citation

Spielman, I. , Reid, G. , Pineiro Escalera, A. , Fritsch, A. and Lu, M. (2022), Dynamically Induced Symmetry Breaking and Out-of-Equilibrium Topology in a 1D Quantum System, Physical Review Letters, [online], https://tsapps.nist.gov/publication/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=934483 (Accessed April 25, 2024)