Berlin 2015 – scientific programme
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TT: Fachverband Tiefe Temperaturen
TT 101: Low-Dimensional Systems: Topological Order 2 (jointly with DS, HL, MA, O)
TT 101.6: Talk
Thursday, March 19, 2015, 16:15–16:30, H 3010
Dissipative Chern Insulators — •Jan Carl Budich1,2, Peter Zoller1,2, and Sebastian Diehl3 — 1Institute for Theoretical Physics, University of Innsbruck, 6020 Innsbruck, Austria — 2Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information, Austrian Academy of Sciences, 6020 Innsbruck, Austria — 3Institute of Theoretical Physics, TU Dresden, D-01062 Dresden, Germany
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 interference 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 novel 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.