Topological Thouless Pumping of Ultracold Fermions

TL;DR

This paper reports the first experimental realization of a topological Thouless pump using ultracold atoms, demonstrating quantized charge transport driven by topological properties of the system's parameter space.

Contribution

It is the first demonstration of topological Thouless pumping with ultracold atoms in a dynamically controlled optical lattice, confirming theoretical predictions.

Findings

Observation of atomic cloud shift due to pumping

Extraction of topological invariance from experimental data

Verification of topological robustness across parameters

Abstract

A gas of electrons in a one-dimensional periodic potential can be transported even in the absence of a voltage bias if the potential is modulated slowly and periodically in time. Remarkably, the transferred charge per cycle is only sensitive to the topology of the path in parameter space. Although this so-called Thouless charge pump has first been proposed more than thirty years ago, it has not yet been realized. Here we report the first demonstration of topological Thouless pumping using ultracold atoms in a dynamically controlled optical superlattice. We observe a shift of the atomic cloud as a result of pumping and extract the topological invariance of the pumping process from this shift. We demonstrate the topological nature of the Thouless pump by varying the topology of the pumping path and verify that the topological pump indeed works in the quantum region by varying speed and temperature.