Observation of a symmetry-protected topological phase of interacting bosons with Rydberg atoms

The concept of topological phases is a powerful framework for characterizing ground states of quantum many-body systems that goes beyond the paradigm of symmetry breaking. Topological phases can appear in condensed-matter systems naturally, whereas the implementation and study of such quantum many-b...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Science (American Association for the Advancement of Science) 2019-08, Vol.365 (6455), p.775-780
Main Authors: de Léséleuc, Sylvain, Lienhard, Vincent, Scholl, Pascal, Barredo, Daniel, Weber, Sebastian, Lang, Nicolai, Büchler, Hans Peter, Lahaye, Thierry, Browaeys, Antoine
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Atomic Physics
Bosons
Physics
Symmetry
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:The concept of topological phases is a powerful framework for characterizing ground states of quantum many-body systems that goes beyond the paradigm of symmetry breaking. Topological phases can appear in condensed-matter systems naturally, whereas the implementation and study of such quantum many-body ground states in artificial matter require careful engineering. Here, we report the experimental realization of a symmetry-protected topological phase of interacting bosons in a one-dimensional lattice and demonstrate a robust ground state degeneracy attributed to protected zero-energy edge states. The experimental setup is based on atoms trapped in an array of optical tweezers and excited into Rydberg levels, which gives rise to hard-core bosons with an effective hopping generated by dipolar exchange interaction.
ISSN:0036-8075
1095-9203
DOI:10.1126/science.aav9105