Dissipative preparation of Chern insulators

Abstract

Engineered dissipation can be employed to prepare interesting quantum many body states in a non-equilibrium fashion. The basic idea is to obtain the state of interest as the unique steady state of a quantum master equation, irrespective of the initial state. Due to a fundamental competition of topology and locality, the dissipative preparation of gapped topological phases with a non-vanishing Chern number has so far remained elusive. Here, we study the open quantum system dynamics of fermions on a two-dimensional lattice in the framework of a Lindblad master equation. In particular, we discover a mechanism to dissipatively prepare a topological steady state with non-zero Chern number by means of short-range system bath interaction. Quite remarkably, this gives rise to a stable topological phase in a non-equilibrium phase diagram. We demonstrate how our theoretical construction can be implemented in a microscopic model that is experimentally feasible with cold atoms in optical lattices.

References in corpus (12)

• Many-Body Physics with Ultracold Gases
• Classification of topological insulators and superconductors in three spatial dimensions
• Ultracold atomic gases in optical lattices: mimicking condensed matter physics and beyond
• Theory of ultracold Fermi gases
• Quantum States and Phases in Driven Open Quantum Systems with Cold Atoms
• An Open-System Quantum Simulator with Trapped Ions
• Measuring the Chern number of Hofstadter bands with ultracold bosonic atoms
• Exponential localization of Wannier functions in insulators
• Induced self-stabilization in fractional quantum Hall states of light
• Quantum response of dephasing open systems
• Dissipative dynamics of atomic Hubbard models coupled to a phonon bath: Dark state cooling of atoms within a Bloch band of an optical lattice
• Search for localized Wannier functions of topological band structures via compressed sensing

Cited by in corpus (10)

• Topological Quantum Matter with Ultracold Gases in Optical Lattices
• New topological invariants in non-Hermitian systems
• Topology of density matrices
• Fate of fractional quantum Hall states in open quantum systems: characterization of correlated topological states for the full Liouvillian
• The upside of noise: engineered dissipation as a resource in superconducting circuits
• Symmetry-protected Topological Phases at Finite Temperature
• Topological order of mixed states in quantum many-body systems
• R-DMFT study of a non-Hermitian skin effect for correlated systems: analysis based on a pseudo-spectrum
• Topology of a dissipative spin: dynamical Chern number, bath induced non-adiabaticity and a quantum dynamo effect
• Statistical Entropy of Open Quantum Systems