Physics (Internal)

Stroboscopic Symmetry Protected Topological Phases

This event is part of the Condensed Matter Theory Seminar Series.

Abstract: Recently, a great deal of attention has been devoted to Symmetry Protected Topological (SPT) phases of matter, which are generalizations of topological insulators to interacting systems. In the first part of the talk, we will discuss a route to constructing spin models of bosonic SPT phases that encode a non-trivial entanglement in the many-body ground state. These can be formulated as Rokhsar-Kivelson type models, for which the ground state satisfies a frustration free condition.
In the second part of the talk we put forward a proposal to realize SPT phases in interacting periodically-driven systems. Our protocol uses a drive in the large frequency regime, where the time evolution is shown to be governed by a Stroboscopic SPT (SSPT) Hamitonian. We show how to realize a spin-1/2 SSPT phase whose signature of the localized edge states can be detected via a dynamical probe. Finally, we discuss the rationale behind obtaining SSPT Hamiltonians, which may open a door to designing short-range entangled states of matter in a controlled way.