Geometrical Pumping with a Bose-Einstein Condensate

We realized a quantum geometric “charge” pump for a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) in the lowest Bloch band of a novel bipartite magnetic lattice [JQI writeup]. Topological charge pumps in filled bands yield quantized pumping set by the global—topological—properties of the bands. In contrast, our geometric charge pump for a BEC occupying just a single crystal momentum state exhibits nonquantized charge pumping set by local—geometrical—properties of the band structure. Like topological charge pumps, for each pump cycle we observed an overall displacement (here, not quantized) and a temporal modulation of the atomic wave packet’s position in each unit cell, i.e., the polarization.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.116.200402

Geometrical Pumping with a Bose-Einstein Condensate; H.-I. Lu, M. Schemmer, L. M. Aycock, D. Genkina, S. Sugawa, and I. B. Spielman; Phys. Rev. Lett. 116 200402 (2016). doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.116.200402