The realization of artificial gauge fields in ultracold atomic gases has opened up a path towards experimental studies of topological insulators and, as an ultimate goal, topological quantum matter in many-body systems. As an alternative to the direct implementation of two-dimensional lattice Hamiltonians that host the quantum Hall effect and its variants, topological charge-pumping experiments provide an additional avenue towards studying many-body systems. Here, we consider an interacting two-component gas of fermions realizing a family of one-dimensional superlattice Hamiltonians with onsite interactions and a unit cell of three sites, whose groundstates would be visited in an appropriately defined charge pump. First, we investigate the grandcanonical quantum phase diagram of individual Hamiltonians, focusing on insulating phases. For a certain commensurate filling, there is a sequence of phase transitions from a band insulator to other insulating phases (related to the physics of ionic Hubbard models) for some members of the manifold of Hamiltonians. Second, we compute the Chern numbers for the whole manifold in a many-body formulation and show that, related to the aforementioned quantum phase transitions, a topological transition results in a change of the value and sign of the Chern number. We provide both an intuitive and conceptual explanation and argue that these properties could be observed in quantum-gas experiments.
In recent experiments with ultracold atoms, both two-dimensional (2d) Chern insulators and one-dimensional (1d) topological charge pumps have been realized. Without interactions, both systems can be described by the same Hamiltonian, when some variables are being reinterpreted. In this paper, we study the relation of both models when Hubbard interactions are added, using the density-matrix renormalization-group algorithm. To this end, we express the fermionic Hofstadter model in a hybrid-space representation, and define a family of interactions, which connects 1d Hubbard charge pumps to 2d Hubbard Chern insulators. We study a three-band model at particle density ρ = 2/3, where the topological quantization of the 1d charge pump changes from Chern number C = 2 to C = −1 as the interaction strength increases. We find that the C = −1 phase is robust when varying the interaction terms on narrow-width cylinders. However, this phase does not extend to the limit of the 2d Hofstadter-Hubbard model, which remains in the C = 2 phase. We discuss the existence of both topological phases for the largest cylinder circumferences that we can access numerically. We note the appearance of a ferromagnetic ground state between the strongly interacting 1d and 2d models. For this ferromagnetic state, one can understand the C = −1 phase from a bandstructure argument. Our method for measuring the Hall conductivity could similarly be realized in experiments: We compute the current response to a weak, linear potential, which is applied adiabatically. The Hall conductivity converges to integer-quantized values for large system sizes, corresponding to the system's Chern number.
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