Interferometric Approach to Measuring Band Topology in 2D Optical Lattices

Dmitry A. Abanin, Takuya Kitagawa, Immanuel Bloch, and Eugene Demler
Phys. Rev. Lett. 110, 165304 – Published 18 April 2013
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Abstract

Recently, optical lattices with nonzero Berry’s phases of Bloch bands have been realized. New approaches for measuring Berry’s phases and topological properties of bands with experimental tools appropriate for ultracold atoms need to be developed. In this Letter, we propose an interferometric method for measuring Berry’s phases of two-dimensional Bloch bands. The key idea is to use a combination of Ramsey interference and Bloch oscillations to measure Zak phases, i.e., Berry’s phases for closed trajectories corresponding to reciprocal lattice vectors. We demonstrate that this technique can be used to measure the Berry curvature of Bloch bands, the π Berry’s phase of Dirac points, and the first Chern number of topological bands. We discuss several experimentally feasible realizations of this technique, which make it robust against low-frequency magnetic noise.

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  • Received 8 December 2012

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.110.165304

© 2013 American Physical Society

Authors & Affiliations

Dmitry A. Abanin1, Takuya Kitagawa1, Immanuel Bloch2,3, and Eugene Demler1

  • 1Physics Department, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138, USA
  • 2Max-Planck-Institut für Quantenoptik, 85748 Garching, Germany
  • 3Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, 80799 München, Germany

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Issue

Vol. 110, Iss. 16 — 19 April 2013

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