Homogeneous Magnetic Flux in Rydberg Lattices

TL;DR

This paper introduces a method to generate homogeneous, tunable magnetic flux in Rydberg atom lattices, enabling the realization of topological flat bands and potential bosonic fractional Chern insulator states.

Contribution

The authors propose a novel approach using Rydberg excitations and ancilla atoms to produce topologically protected, homogeneous magnetic flux in lattice systems.

Findings

Homogeneous flux can be optimized by adjusting ancilla atom positions.

A topological flat band emerges in the single-particle regime.

Evidence suggests the formation of a bosonic fractional Chern insulator at half filling.

Abstract

We present a method for generating homogeneous and tunable magnetic flux for bosonic particles in a lattice using Rydberg atoms. Our setup relies on Rydberg excitations hopping through the lattice by dipolar exchange interactions. The magnetic flux arises from complex hopping via ancilla atoms. Remarkably, the total flux within a magnetic unit cell directly depends on the ratio of the number of lattice sites to ancilla atoms, making it topologically protected to small changes in the positions of the atoms. This allows us to optimize the positions of the ancilla atoms to make the flux through the magnetic unit cell homogeneous. With this homogeneous flux, we get a topological flat band in the single-particle regime. In the many-body regime, we obtain indications of a bosonic fractional Chern insulator state at $\nu = 1/2$ filling.