• DOI:10.1038/s41586-021-03688-9
• Corpus ID: 235658815

Quantized nonlinear Thouless pumping.

@article{Jrgensen2021QuantizedNT,
  title={Quantized nonlinear Thouless pumping.},
  author={Marius J{\"u}rgensen and Sebabrata Mukherjee and Mikael C. Rechtsman},
  journal={Nature},
  year={2021},
  volume={596 7870},
  pages={
          63-67
        }
}

• Marius Jürgensen, Sebabrata Mukherjee, M. Rechtsman
• Published 27 June 2021
• Physics
• Nature

The topological protection of wave transport, originally observed in the context of the quantum Hall effect in two-dimensional electron gases1, has been shown to apply broadly to a range of physical platforms, including photonics2-5, ultracold atoms in optical lattices6-8 and others9-12. That said, the behaviour of such systems can be very different from the electronic case, particularly when interparticle interactions or nonlinearity play a major role13-22. A Thouless pump23 is a one-dimensional model that captures the topological quantization of transport in the quantum Hall effect using the notion of dimensional reduction: an adiabatically, time-varying potential mathematically maps onto a momentum coordinate in a conceptual second dimension24-34. Importantly, quantization assumes uniformly filled electron bands below a Fermi energy, or an equivalent occupation for non-equilibrium bosonic systems. Here we theoretically propose and experimentally demonstrate quantized nonlinear Thouless pumping of photons with a band that is decidedly not uniformly occupied. In our system, nonlinearity acts to quantize transport via soliton formation and spontaneous symmetry-breaking bifurcations. Quantization follows from the fact that the instantaneous soliton solutions centred upon a given unit cell are identical after each pump cycle, up to translation invariance; this is an entirely different mechanism from traditional Thouless pumping. This result shows that nonlinearity and interparticle interactions can induce quantized transport and topological behaviour without a linear counterpart.