# Dissipation assisted Thouless pumping in the Rice-Mele model

## TL;DR

This paper shows that dissipation from a thermal environment can enhance the robustness of topological charge pumping in the Rice-Mele model, making it more quantized and experimentally feasible.

## Contribution

It demonstrates that dissipation can improve topological pumping quantization in the Rice-Mele model, using a Floquet framework and quantum master equations.

## Key findings

- Dissipation increases Floquet band population with topological winding.
- Dissipative dynamics lead to more accurate quantized charge pumping.
- Quantum master equation matches exact MPS results at low temperature.

## Abstract

We investigate the effect of dissipation from a thermal environment on topological pumping in the periodically-driven Rice-Mele model. We report that dissipation can improve the robustness of pumping quantisation in a regime of finite driving frequencies. Specifically, in this regime, a low-temperature dissipative dynamics can lead to a pumped charge that is much closer to the Thouless quantised value, compared to a coherent evolution. We understand this effect in the Floquet framework: dissipation increases the population of a Floquet band which shows a topological winding, where pumping is essentially quantised. This finding is a step towards understanding a potentially very useful resource to exploit in experiments, where dissipation effects are unavoidable. We consider small couplings with the environment and we use a Bloch-Redfield quantum master equation approach for our numerics: Comparing these results with an exact MPS numerical treatment we find that the quantum master equation works very well also at low temperature, a quite remarkable fact.