Person:

Abanin, Dmitry

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.

Geometric phases that characterize the topological properties of Bloch bands play a fundamental role in the band theory of solids. Here we report on the measurement of the geometric phase acquired by cold atoms moving in one-dimensional optical lattices. Using a combination of Bloch oscillations and Ramsey interferometry, we extract the Zak phase—the Berry phase gained during the adiabatic motion of a particle across the Brillouin zone—which can be viewed as an invariant characterizing the topological properties of the band. For a dimerized lattice, which models polyacetylene, we measure a difference of the Zak phase δφZak = 0.97(2)π for the two possible polyacetylene phases with different dimerization. The two dimerized phases therefore belong to different topological classes, such that for a filled band, domain walls have fractional quantum numbers. Our work establishes a new general approach for probing the topological structure of Bloch bands inoptical lattices.