Synthesizing the Quantum Spin Hall Phase for Ultracold Atoms in Bichromatic Chiral Optical Ladders

TL;DR

This paper proposes a method to realize the quantum spin Hall phase in ultracold atoms using bichromatic chiral optical ladders, enabling exploration of topological quantum matter in experimental cold atom systems.

Contribution

The authors introduce a scheme to synthesize topological quantum phases, including the quantum spin Hall phase, in chiral optical ladders with pseudo-spin-orbit coupling and Zeeman splitting.

Findings

Existence of quantum spin Hall phase in bichromatic chiral ladders

Rich phase diagram with multiple quantum phase transitions

Feasible implementation in current experimental setups

Abstract

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 further identify a rich phase diagram of the bichromatic chiral ladders, illustrating that our proposal features a large space of system parameters exhibiting a variety of quantum phase transitions. Our scheme can be readily implemented in the existing experimental systems and hence provides a new method to engineer the sophisticated topological bands for cold atomic gases.