Topological energy conversion through bulk or boundary of driven systems

TL;DR

This paper introduces driven 1D systems that realize high-dimensional topological states enabling tunable energy conversion between drives, demonstrating bulk and boundary effects linked to topological insulators, with potential experimental implementations.

Contribution

The work presents novel quasiperiodically driven 1D systems that achieve topological energy conversion, connecting 1D dynamics to 4D quantum Hall states and axion electrodynamics.

Findings

Realization of 4D quantum Hall state with three drives.

Energy conversion at the bulk with three drives.

Edge energy conversion with two drives.

Abstract

Combining physical and synthetic dimensions allows a controllable realization and manipulation of high dimensional topological states. In our work, we introduce two quasiperiodically driven 1D systems which enable tunable topological energy conversion between different driving sources. Using three drives, we realize a 4D quantum Hall state which allows energy conversion between two of the drives within the bulk of the 1D system. With only two drives, we achieve energy conversion between the two at the edge of the chain. Both effects are a manifestation of the effective axion electrodynamics in a 3D time-reversal invariant topological insulator. Furthermore, we explore the effects of disorder and commensurability of the driving frequencies, and show the phenomena is robust. We propose two experimental platforms, based on semiconductor heterostructures and ultracold atoms in optical lattices, in order to observe the topological energy conversion.