Employing the external degrees of freedom of atoms as synthetic dimensions renders easy and new accesses to quantum engineering and quantum simulation. As a recent development, ultracold atoms suffering from two-photon Bragg transitions can be diffracted into a series of discrete momentum states to form a momentum lattice. Here we provide a detailed analysis on such a system, and, as a concrete example, report the observation of robust helical Floquet channels, by introducing periodic driving sequences. The robustness of these channels against perturbations is confirmed, as a test for their topological origin captured by Floquet winding numbers. The periodic switching demonstrated here serves as a testbed for more complicated Floquet engieering schemes, and offers exciting opportunities to study novel topological physics in a many-body setting with tunable interactions.
Periodic driving of a quantum system can significantly alter its energy bands and even change the band topology, opening a completely new avenue for engineering novel quantum matter. Although important progress has been made recently in measuring topological properties of Floquet bands in different systems, direct experimental measurement of Floquet band dispersions and their topology change is still demanding. Here we directly measure Floquet band dispersions in a periodically driven spin-orbit coupled ultracold Fermi gas. Using spin injection radio-frequency spectroscopy, we observe that the…
We report on the experimental implementation of tunable occupation-dependent tunneling in a Bose-Hubbard system of ultracold atoms via time-periodic modulation of the on-site interaction energy. The tunneling rate is inferred from a time-resolved measurement of the lattice site occupation after a quantum quench. We demonstrate coherent control of the tunneling dynamics in the correlated many-body system, including full suppression of tunneling as predicted within the framework of Floquet theory. We find that the tunneling rate explicitly depends on the atom number difference in neighboring lat…
In this paper, we propose that a simple model, in which fermions coupled to a dynamical lattice gauge field, can be engineered via the Floquet approach. The model possess both a independent Maxwell term and the local $Z_{2}$ gauge symmetry. Our proposal relies on a species dependent optical lattice, and can be achieved in one, two or three dimension. By an unitary transformation, this model can be mapped into a non-interacting composite Fermion system with fluctuating back ground charge. With the help of this composite Fermion picture, two characteristic observations are predicted. One is the …
In systems of ultracold atoms, pairwise interactions are resonantly enhanced by the application of an oscillating magnetic field that is parallel to the spin-quantization axis of the atoms. The resonance occurs when the frequency of the applied field is precisely tuned near the transition frequency between the scattering atoms and a diatomic molecule. The resulting cross section can be made more than two orders of magnitude larger than the cross section in the absence of the oscillating field. The low momentum resonance properties have a universal description that is independent of the atomic …
We describe an experimental setup for imaging topologically protected Floquet edge states using ultracold bosons in an optical lattice. Our setup involves a deep two dimensional optical lattice with a time dependent superlattice that modulates the hopping between neighboring sites. The finite waist of the superlattice beam yields regions with different topological numbers. One can observe chiral edge states by imaging the real-space density of a bosonic packet launched from the boundary between two topologically distinct regions.
We show how dispersionless channels exhibiting perfect spin-momentum locking can arise in a 1D lattice model. While such spectra are forbidden by fermion doubling in static 1D systems, here we demonstrate their appearance in the stroboscopic dynamics of a periodically driven system. Remarkably, this phenomenon does not rely on any adiabatic assumptions, in contrast to the well known Thouless pump and related models of adiabatic spin pumps. The proposed setup is shown to be experimentally feasible with state of the art techniques used to control ultracold alkaline earth atoms in optical lattice…
Quantum simulation has the potential to investigate gauge theories in strongly-interacting regimes, which are up to now inaccessible through conventional numerical techniques. Here, we take a first step in this direction by implementing a Floquet-based method for studying $\mathbb{Z}_2$ lattice gauge theories using two-component ultracold atoms in a double-well potential. For resonant periodic driving at the on-site interaction strength and an appropriate choice of the modulation parameters, the effective Floquet Hamiltonian exhibits $\mathbb{Z}_2$ symmetry. We study the dynamics of the system…
Floquet dynamics of a quantum system subject to periodic modulations of system parameters provide a powerful tool for engineering new quantum matter with exotic properties. While system dynamics are significantly altered, the periodic modulation itself is usually induced externally and independent of Floquet dynamics. Here we propose a new type of Floquet physics for a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) subject to a shaken lattice generated inside a cavity, where the shaken lattice and atomic Floquet bands are mutually dependent, resulting in self-adapted Floquet dynamics. In particular, the shake…
A gas of ultracold interacting quantum degenerate Fermions is considered in a three dimensional optical lattice which is externally modulated in the fre- quency and the amplitude. This theoretical study utilizes the Keldysh formalism to account for the system being out of thermodynamical equilibrium. A dynamical mean field theory, extended to non-equilibrium, is presented to calculate characteristic quantities such as the local density of states and the non-equilibrium distribution function. A dynamics Franz-Keldysh splitting is found which accounts for the non-equilibrium modification of the …
Spatiotemporal Non-Hermitian Skin Effect with Floquet-Engineered Ultracold Atoms
Quantum Institute for Light and Atoms, School of Physics, East China Normal University（华东师范大学物理学院光与原子量子研究所）；School of Physics and Astronomy, and Tsung-Dao Lee Institute, Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学物理与天文学院及李政道研究所）；Shanghai Branch, Hefei National Laboratory（合肥国家实验室上海分部）；Shanghai Research Center for Quantum Sciences（上海量子科学研究与创新中心）；Collaborative Innovation Center of Extreme Optics, Shanxi University（山西大学极端光学协同创新中心）
Coherent control via periodic modulation, also known as Floquet engineering, has emerged as a powerful experimental method for the realization of novel quantum systems with exotic properties. In particular, it has been employed to study topological phenomena in a variety of different platforms. In driven systems, the topological properties of the quasienergy bands can often be determined by standard topological invariants, such as Chern numbers, which are commonly used in static systems. However, due to the periodic nature of the quasienergy spectrum, this topological description is incomplete…
Topological band structures can be designed by subjecting lattice systems to time-periodic modulations, as was recently demonstrated in cold atoms and photonic crystals. However, changing the topological nature of Floquet Bloch bands from trivial to non-trivial, by progressively launching the time-modulation, is necessarily accompanied with gap-closing processes: this has important consequences for the loading of particles into a target Floquet band with non-trivial topology, and hence, on the subsequent measurements. In this work, we analyse how such loading sequences can be optimized in view…
We discuss a platform for the synthetic realization of key physical properties of helical Tomonaga Luttinger liquids (HTLLs) with ultracold fermionic atoms in one-dimensional optical lattices. The HTLL is a strongly correlated metallic state where spin polarization and propagation direction of the itinerant particles are locked to each other. We propose an unconventional one-dimensional Fermi-Hubbard model which, at quarter filling, resembles the HTLL in the long wavelength limit, as we demonstrate with a combination of analytical (bosonization) and numerical (density matrix renormalization gr…
Open physical systems with balanced loss and gain, described by non-Hermitian parity-time ($\mathcal{PT}$) reflection symmetric Hamiltonians, exhibit a transition which could engenders modes that exponentially decay or grow with time and thus spontaneously breaks the $\mathcal{PT}$-symmetry. Such $\mathcal{PT}$-symmetry breaking transitions have attracted many interests because of their extraordinary behaviors and functionalities absent in closed systems. Here we report on the observation of $\mathcal{PT}$-symmetry breaking transitions by engineering time-periodic dissipation and coupling, whi…
Probing disorder-driven topological phase transitions via topological edge modes with ultracold atoms in Floquet-engineered honeycomb lattices
Max-Planck-Institut für Quantenoptik（马克斯·普朗克量子光学研究所）；Munich Center for Quantum Science and Technology (MCQST)（慕尼黑量子科学与技术中心）；Fakultät für Physik, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität（慕尼黑大学物理学院）
We propose and study a quantum pump which emulates a traditional paddlewheel, that can be implemented with ultracold atoms in waveguides. We use wavepacket propagation to study its single-mode dynamics, which also determines its multimode current for mesoscopic setups. Energy flow with or without particle transport is possible. The spectrum reveals unusual features such as nonuniform Floquet side-bands and counter-intuitive scattering. Explanations are found by examining the scattering dynamics comparatively using quantum, classical and semiclassical pictures, indicating a rich system and expe…
We present a brief overview of the phases and dynamics of ultracold bosons in an optical lattice in the presence of a tilt. We begin with a brief summary of the possible experimental setup for generating the tilt. This is followed by a discussion of the effective low-energy model for these systems and its equilibrium phases. We also chart the relation of this model to the recently studied system of ultracold Rydberg atoms. Next, we discuss the non-equilibrium dynamics of this model for quench, ramp and periodic protocols with emphasis on the periodic drive which can be understood in terms of a…
The examples of the classical liquids confined by rotating helical boundaries are considered and these examples are compared with rotating helical reservoir filled by ultracold bosonic ensemble. From the point of view of observer who co-rotates with classical liquid trapped by reservoir the quantum fluid will move translationally alongside rotation axis while in laboratory frame the quantum fluid will stay in rest. This behavior of quantum ensemble which is exactly opposite to the classical case might be interpreted as a helical analog of Hess-Fairbank effect.
We present a quantitative, near-term experimental blueprint for the quantum simulation of topological insulators using lattice-trapped ultracold polar molecules. In particular, we focus on the so-called Hopf insulator, which represents a three-dimensional topological state of matter existing outside the conventional tenfold way and crystalline-symmetry-based classifications of topological insulators. Its topology is protected by a \emph{linking number} invariant, which necessitates long-range spin-orbit coupled hoppings for its realization. While these ingredients have so far precluded its rea…
We analyze time-of-flight absorption images obtained with dilute Bose-Einstein con-densates released from shaken optical lattices, both theoretically and experimentally. We argue that weakly interacting, ultracold quantum gases in kilohertz-driven optical potentials constitute equilibrium systems characterized by a steady-state distri-bution of Floquet-state occupation numbers. Our experimental results consistently indicate that a driven ultracold Bose gas tends to occupy a single Floquet state, just as it occupies a single energy eigenstate when there is no forcing. When the driving amplitude…
We experimentally realized a time-periodically modulated 1D lattice for ultracold atoms featuring a pair of linear bands, each associated with a Floquet winding number: a topological invariant. These bands are spin-momentum locked and almost perfectly linear everywhere in the Brillouin zone (BZ), making this system a near-ideal realization of the 1D Dirac Hamiltonian. We characterized the Floquet winding number using a form of quantum state tomography, covering the BZ and following the micromotion through one Floquet period. Lastly, we altered the modulation timing to lift the topological prot…
We investigate the out-of-equilibrium properties of a system of interacting bosons in a ring lattice. We present a Floquet driving that induces clockwise (counterclockwise) circulation of the particles among the odd (even) sites of the ring which can be mapped to a fully connected model of clocks of two counter-rotating species. The clock-like motion of the particles is at the core of a period-$n$ discrete time crystal where $L=2n$ is the number of lattice sites. In presence of a "staircase-like" on-site potential, we report the emergence of a second characteristic timescale in addition to the…
We present the first experimental demonstration of a multiple-radiofrequency dressed potential for the configurable magnetic confinement of ultracold atoms. We load cold $^{87}$Rb atoms into a double well potential with an adjustable barrier height, formed by three radiofrequencies applied to atoms in a static quadrupole magnetic field. Our multiple-radiofrequency approach gives precise control over the double well characteristics, including the depth of individual wells and the height of the barrier, and enables reliable transfer of atoms between the available trapping geometries. We have cha…
Floquet engineering is the concept of tailoring a system by a periodic drive. It has been very successful in opening new classes of Hamiltonians to the study with ultracold atoms in optical lattices, such as artificial gauge fields, topological band structures and density-dependent tunneling. Furthermore, driven systems provide new physics without static counterpart such as anomalous Floquet topological insulators. In this review article, we provide an overview of the exciting developments in the field and discuss the current challenges and perspectives.
We propose a practical protocol to generate and observe a non-Abelian geometric phase using a periodically driven Raman process in the hyperfne ground state manifold of atoms in a dilute ultracold gas. Our analysis is based upon recent developments and application of Floquet theory to periodically driven quantum systems. The simulation results show the non-Abelian gauge transformation and the non-commuting property of the SU(2) transformation operators. Based on these results, we propose a possible experimental implementation with an ultracold dilute Bose gas.
A primer on the Floquet theory of periodically time-dependent quantum systems is provided, and it is shown how to apply this framework for computing the quasienergy band structure governing the dynamics of ultracold atoms in driven optical cosine lattices. Such systems are viewed here as spatially and temporally periodic structures living in an extended Hilbert space, giving rise to spatio-temporal Bloch waves whose dispersion relations can be manipulated at will by exploiting ac-Stark shifts and multiphoton resonances. The elements required for numerical calculations are introduced in a tutor…
We study the response of ultracold atoms to a weak force in the presence of a temporally strongly modulated optical lattice potential. It is experimentally demonstrated that the strong ac-driving allows for a tailoring of the mobility of a dilute atomic Bose-Einstein condensate with the atoms moving ballistically either along or against the direction of the applied force. Our results are in agreement with a theoretical analysis of the Floquet spectrum of a model system, thus revealing the existence of diabatic Floquet bands in the atom's band spectra and highlighting their role in the non-equi…
We investigate the excitation properties of finite utracold bosonic systems in a one-dimensional harmonic trap with a time-dependent interaction strength. The driving of the interatomic coupling induces excitations of the relative motion exclusively with specific and controllable contributions of momentarily excited many-body states. Mechanisms for selective excitation to few-body analogues of collective modes and acceleration occur in the vicinity of resonances. We study via the few-body spectrum and a Floquet analysis the excitation mechanisms, and the corresponding impact of the driving fre…
Periodically driven systems play a prominent role in optical lattices. In these ultracold atomic systems, driving is used to create a variety of interesting behaviours, of which an important example is provided by topological states of matter. Such Floquet topological phases have a richer classification that their equilibrium counterparts. Although analogues of the equilibrium topological phases exist, which are characterised by a Chern number, the corresponding Hall conductivity, and protected edge states, there is an additional possibility. This is a phase that has vanishing Chern number and…
Ultracold atomic gases in two dimensions tuned close to a p-wave Feshbach resonance were expected to exhibit topological superfluidity, but these were found to be experimentally unstable. We show that one can induce a topological Floquet superfluid if weakly interacting atoms are brought suddenly close ("quenched") to such a resonance, in the time before the instability kicks in. The resulting superfluid possesses Majorana edge modes, yet differs from a conventional Floquet system as it is not driven externally. Instead, the periodic modulation is self-generated by the dynamics.
We study the odd integer filled Mott phases of a spin-1 Bose-Hubbard chain and determine their fate in the presence of a Raman induced spin-orbit coupling which has been achieved in ultracold atomic gases; this system is described by a quantum spin-1 chain with a spiral magnetic field. The spiral magnetic field initially induces helical order with either ferromagnetic or dimer order parameters, giving rise to a spiral paramagnet at large field. The spiral ferromagnet-to-paramagnet phase transition is in a novel universality class, with critical exponents associated with the divergence of the c…
Realizing the topological bands of helical states poses a challenge in studying ultracold atomic gases. Motivated by the recent experimental success in realizing chiral optical ladders, here we present a scheme for synthesizing topological quantum matter, especially the quantum spin Hall phase, in the chiral optical ladders. More precisely, we first establish the synthetic pseudo-spin-orbit coupling and Zeeman splitting in the chiral ladders. We analyze the band structure of the ladders exposed to the bichromatic optical potentials and report the existence of quantum spin Hall phase. We furthe…
We propose the implementation of a quantum heat pump with ultracold atoms. It is based on two periodically driven coherently coupled quantum dots using ultracold atoms. Each dot possesses two relevant quantum states and is coupled to a fermionic reservoir. The working principle is based on energy-selective driving-induced resonant tunneling processes, where a particle that tunnels from one dot to the other either absorbs or emits the energy quantum $\hbarω$ associated with the driving frequency, depending on its energy. We characterize the device using Floquet theory and compare simple analyti…
We consider an ensemble of ultracold bosonic atoms within a near-planar cavity, driven by a far detuned laser whose phase is modulated at a frequency comparable to the transverse cavity mode spacing. We show that a strong, dispersive atom-photon coupling can be reached for many transverse cavity modes at once. The resulting Floquet polaritons involve a superposition of a set of cavity modes with a density excitation of the atomic cloud. The mutual interactions between these modes lead to distinct avoided crossings between the polaritons. Increasing the laser drive intensity, a low-lying multim…
We show that the magnetic field produced by a chiral ferromagnetic film can be applied to control ultracold atoms. The film will act as a magnetic mirror or a reflection grating for ultracold atoms when it is in the helical phase or the skyrmion crystal phase respectively. By applying a bias magnetic field and a time-dependent magnetic field, one-dimensional or two-dimensional magnetic lattices including honeycomb, Kagome, triangular types can be created to trap the ultracold atoms. We have also discussed the trapping height, potential barrier, trapping frequency, and Majorana loss rate for ea…
Controlling interactions is the key element for quantum engineering of many-body systems. Using time-periodic driving, a naturally given many-body Hamiltonian of a closed quantum system can be transformed into an effective target Hamiltonian exhibiting vastly different dynamics. We demonstrate such Floquet engineering with a system of spins represented by Rydberg states in an ultracold atomic gas. Applying a sequence of spin manipulations, we change the symmetry properties of the effective Heisenberg XYZ Hamiltonian. As a consequence, the relaxation behavior of the total spin is drastically mo…
We explore prethermal Floquet steady states and instabilities of the weakly interacting two-dimensional Bose-Hubbard model subject to periodic driving. We develop a description of the nonequilibrium dynamics, at arbitrary drive strength and frequency, using a weak-coupling conserving approximation. We establish the regimes in which conventional (zero-momentum) and unconventional [$(π,π)$-momentum] condensates are stable on intermediate time scales. We find that condensate stability is \emph{enhanced} by increasing the drive strength, because this decreases the bandwidth of quasiparticle excita…
We describe the behavior of a system of fermionic atoms loaded in a bipartite one-dimensional optical lattice that is under the action of an external time-periodic driving force. By using Floquet theory, an effective model with renormalized hopping coefficients is derived. The insulating behavior characterizing the system at half-filling in the absence of driving is dynamically suppressed and for particular values of the driving parameter the system becomes either a standard metal or an unconventional metal with four Fermi points. We use the bosonization technique to investigate the effect of …
We solve the two-particle s-wave scattering for an ultracold atom gas confined in a quasi-one-dimensional trapping potential which is periodically modulated. The interaction between the atoms is included in terms of Fermi's pseudopotential. For a modulated isotropic transverse harmonic confinement, the atomic center of mass and relative degrees of freedom decouple and an exact solution is possible. We use the Floquet approach to show that additional photon-assisted resonant scattering channels open up due to the harmonic modulation. Applying the Bethe-Peierls boundary condition, we obtain the …
Floquet modulation has been widely used in optical lattices for coherent control of quantum gases, in particular for synthesizing artificial gauge fields and simulating topological matters. However, such modulation induces heating which can overwhelm the signal of quantum dynamics in ultracold atoms. Here we report that the thermal motion, instead of being a noise source, provides a new control knob in Floquet-modulated superradiance lattices, which are momentum-space tight-binding lattices of collectively excited states of atoms. The Doppler shifts combined with Floquet modulation provide eff…
Bloch-sphere rotations in driven double-well for ultracold atoms
University of the Basque Country (EHU)（巴斯克大学）；IKERBASQUE, Basque Foundation for Science（伊卡巴斯基奎科学基金会）；EHU Quantum Center, University of the Basque Country (EHU)（巴斯克大学量子中心）；Università di Firenze（佛罗伦萨大学）；Istituto Nazionale di Ottica, Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche (CNR-INO)（国家光学研究所，意大利国家研究委员会）；European Laboratory for Nonlinear Spectroscopy (LENS)（欧洲非线性光谱学实验室）；INFN Sezione di Firenze（佛罗伦萨国家核物理研究所）
For cold atomic systems, varying the optical lattice potential periodically provides a general and simple way to drive the system into phases with nontrivial topology. Besides its simplicity, this driving approach, compared to the usual driving approach by exerting an external electromagnetic field to the static system, has the merit that it does not break the original static system's time-reversal symmetry at any given time. Based on this approach, we find that a trivial insulator with time-reversal symmetry can be driven into a Floquet quantum spin Hall insulator. This novel state of matter …
We theoretically introduce a new type of topological dipole solitons propagating in a Floquet topological insulator based on a kagome array of helical waveguides. Such solitons bifurcate from two edge states belonging to different topological gaps and have bright envelopes of different symmetries: fundamental for one component, and dipole for the other. The formation of dipole solitons is enabled by unique spectral features of the kagome array which allow the simultaneous coexistence of two topological edge states from different gaps at the same boundary. Notably, these states have equal and n…
The manipulation of many-body systems often involves time-dependent forces that cause unwanted heating. One strategy to suppress heating is to use time-periodic (Floquet) forces at large driving frequencies. For quantum spin systems with bounded spectra, it was shown rigorously that the heating rate is exponentially small in the driving frequency. Recently, the exponential suppression of heating has also been observed in an experiment with ultracold atoms, realizing a periodically driven Bose-Hubbard model. This model has an unbounded spectrum and, hence, is beyond the reach of previous theore…
