2021/01/20 by Sebastian Weber, Weber, Sebastian, Przemysław Bienias +4
Physics and Astronomy · #Cold Atom Physics and Bose-Einstein Condensates #Quantum and electron transport phenomena #Topological Materials and Phenomena #cond-mat.quant-gas #physics.atom-ph #quant-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2101.08363
8 pages, 5 figures
arxiv created 2021/01/20 · arxiv updated 2021/01/22
The quest to realize topological band structures in artificial matter is strongly focused on lattice systems, and only quantum Hall physics is known to appear naturally also in the continuum. In this letter, we present a proposal based on a two-dimensional cloud of atoms dressed to Rydberg states, where excitations propagate by dipolar exchange interaction, while the Rydberg blockade phenomenon naturally gives rise to a characteristic length scale, suppressing the hopping on short distances. Then, the system becomes independent of the atoms' spatial arrangement and can be described by a continuum model. We demonstrate the appearance of a topological band structure in the continuum characterized by a Chern number C=2 and show that edge states appear at interfaces tunable by the atomic density.