Temperature-induced effective topology in many-body ultracold atomic quantum systems

Abstract:Ultracold atomic quantum systems offer an unprecedentedly powerful platform for exploring interacting symmetry-protected topological phases. Here, we show that their characteristic control over temperature provides a resource for engineering effective topological regimes with no zero-temperature counterpart. Employing finite-temperature matrix-product-state calculations, we investigate experimentally accessible Hamiltonians - the interacting bosonic Su-Schrieffer-Heeger and spin-1 XXZ chains - that host a topological phase at zero temperature, as well as a fermionic dipolar ladder model whose ground state exhibits no topological order. By tracking complementary topological markers, we identify an intriguing mechanism rooted in the structure of the zero-temperature phase diagrams: in finite-size systems, excitation gaps with different magnitudes define an intermediate-temperature window where the correlations associated with the lower gap are suppressed, while those protected by the larger gap persist. This enables the emergence of effective finite-temperature regimes exhibiting topological features that are either absent or qualitatively different from those at zero temperature. Our results establish a novel route toward exploring effective topological phases in ultracold atomic quantum systems.

Quantum Gases (cond-mat.quant-gas); Strongly Correlated Electrons (cond-mat.str-el); Quantum Physics (quant-ph)

arXiv:2609.09463 [cond-mat.quant-gas]

(or arXiv:2609.09463v1 [cond-mat.quant-gas] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.09463 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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