Interaction-assisted topological pumping in few- and many-atom Rydberg arrays

TL;DR

This paper investigates how dipolar interactions influence topological pumping in Rydberg atom arrays, revealing interaction-assisted, self-bound states that enable robust quantum charge transport in few- and many-body systems.

Contribution

It demonstrates the persistence of interaction-assisted topological pumping from few-body to many-body Rydberg systems, introducing an emergent pair-state topological pump.

Findings

Dipolar interactions induce self-bound states that are efficiently pumped.

Interaction-assisted pumping persists in many-atom arrays with enhanced spatial connectivity.

The study links classical nonlinear photonics phenomena to quantum many-body topological dynamics.

Abstract

Topology can imbue lattice systems with special properties, notably the presence of robust eigenstates living at their boundary. Through dimensional reduction, the robust bulk band topology of, e.g., the integer quantum Hall system can be mapped onto similarly robust charge-pumping dynamics of a topological pump living in one lower dimension. Recent studies have uncovered a rich influence of interactions on the dynamics of topological pumps in nonlinear systems, including the robust pumping of self-bound solitons. These striking observations in classical nonlinear photonics have raised a number of questions, chiefly if and how this phenomenology persists in strongly correlated quantum systems and in the few-body limit. Here, using few- and many-atom arrays, we explore how dipolar interactions impact the dynamics of topological population pumping along a Rydberg synthetic dimension. In the few-body limit, we find that dipolar interactions lead to self-bound states that are efficiently pumped along the synthetic dimension, described by an emergent pair-state topological pump. We find that this interaction-assisted pumping persists in many-atom arrays, with a sharpened dependence on the dipolar interaction strength that stems from the enhanced spatial connectivity. These Rydberg-based studies on interaction-assisted topological pumping help connect observations from classical nonlinear photonics to the few-body quantum limit and pave the way for studies of new strongly correlated quantum pumping phenomena.