Dresden 2017 – scientific programme
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TT: Fachverband Tiefe Temperaturen
TT 56: Poster Session: Low-Dimensional Systems
TT 56.8: Poster
Wednesday, March 22, 2017, 15:00–19:00, P2-OG4
Topological charge pumping due to rotating magnetic fields in a Rashba spin-orbit coupled curved nanowire — •Sudhakar Pandey1, Paola Gentile2, Mario Cuoco2, and Carmine Ortix1,3 — 1Institute for Theoretical Solid State Physics, IFW Dresden, 01069 Dresden, Germany — 2CNR-SPIN and Dipartimento di Fisica "E. R. Caianiello", Universita di Salerno, I-84084 Fisciano (Salerno), Italy — 3Institute for Theoretical Physics, Center for Extreme Matter and Emergent Phenomena, Utrecht University, Princetonplein 5, 3584 CC Utrecht, Netherlands
Topological charge pumping refers to transport of charge in a system due to an adiabatic temporal change in the periodic potential. The transported charge per pump cycle is quantized, and purely determined by the topology of the pump cycle, which can be characterized by a topological invariant: the Chern number. Although introduced originally more that three decades ago [1], its experimental realization has been achieved recently in ultracold bosonic [2] and fermionic [3] atoms loaded in the optical superlattices. In this work we demonstrate that a Rashba spin-orbit coupled curved wire subject to a rotating magnetic field can work as a topological charge pump. In a descretized system with N atoms per unit cell we find a Chern number C=2 at the band fillings n=1/N and (N-1)/N. The fact that these results are robust even in the continuum limit makes our proposal feasible experimentally.
[1] D.J. Thouless, Phys. Rev. B 27, 6083 (1983)
[2] M. Lohse et al., Nat. Phys. 12, 350 (2016)
[3] S. Nakajima et al., Nat. Phys. 12, 296 (2016)