Quantized Fractional Thouless Pumping of Solitons

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that strong nonlinearity in photonic systems causes solitons to exhibit fractional quantized motion in a Thouless pump, revealing new topological phenomena influenced by interactions.

Contribution

It provides the first experimental and theoretical evidence of fractional quantization of soliton motion in nonlinear Thouless pumps due to strong interactions.

Findings

Solitons return to initial state after multiple pump cycles with fractional displacement.

Strong nonlinearity induces fractional quantization of soliton transport.

Experimental confirmation using coupled optical waveguides.

Abstract

In many contexts, the interaction between particles gives rise to emergent and perhaps unanticipated physical phenomena. An example is the fractional quantum Hall effect, where interaction between electrons gives rise to fractionally quantized Hall conductance. In photonic systems, the nonlinear response of an ambient medium acts to mediate interaction between photons; in the mean-field limit these dynamics are described by the nonlinear Schr\"odinger (also called Gross-Pitaevskii) equation. Recently, it was shown that at weak nonlinearity, soliton motion in nonlinear Thouless pumps (a dimensionally reduced implementation of a Chern insulator) could be quantized to the Chern number of the band from which the soliton bifurcates. Here, we show theoretically and experimentally using arrays of coupled optical waveguides that sufficiently strong nonlinearity acts to fractionally quantize the motion of solitons. Specifically, we find that the soliton returns to itself after multiple cycles of the Thouless pump - but displaced by an integer number of unit cells - leading to a rich fractional plateaux structure describing soliton motion. Our results demonstrate a perhaps surprising example of the behavior of non-trivial topological systems in the presence of interactions.