Circuit QED simulator of two-dimensional Su-Schrieffer-Hegger model: magnetic field induced topological phase transition in high-order topological insulators

  1. Sheng Li,
  2. Xiao-Xue Yan,
  3. Jin-Hua Gao,
  4. and Yong Hu
High-order topological insulator (HOTI) occupies an important position in topological band theory due to its exotic bulk-edge correspondence. Recently, it has been predicted that external
magnetic field can introduce rich physics into two-dimensional (2D) HOTIs. However, up to now the theoretical description is still incomplete and the experimental realization is still lacking. Here we investigate the influence of continuously varying magnetic field on 2D Su-Schriffer-Heeger lattice, which is one of the most celebrated HOTI models, and proposed a corresponding circuit quantum electrodynamics (cQED) simulator. Our numerical calculation shows that the zero energy corner modes (ZECMs), which can serve as evidence of the high order topology of the lattice, exhibit exotic and rich dependence on the imposed magnetic field and the inhomogeneous hopping strength. Moreover, by exploiting the parametric conversion method, we can establish time- and site-resolved tunable hopping constants in the proposed cQED simulator, thus providing an ideal platform for simulating the magnetic field induced topological phase transitions in 2D HOTIs. Since the high-order topological phases of the proposed model can be characterized by the existence of the ZECMs on the lattice, we further investigate the corner site excitation of the lattice in the steady state limit. Our numerical results imply that the predicted topological phase transitions can be unambiguously identified by the steady-state photon number measurement of the corner sites and their few neighbors. Requiring only current level of technology, our scheme can be readily tested in experiment and may pave an alternative way towards the future investigation of HOTIs in the presence of magnetic field, disorder, and strong correlation.

Superradiant phase transition with flat bands in a circuit QED lattice

  1. Gui-Lei Zhu,
  2. Xin-You Lü,
  3. Hamidreza Ramezani,
  4. Clive Emary,
  5. Jin-Hua Gao,
  6. and Ying Wu
We investigate the interplay of superradiant phase transition (SPT) and energy band physics in an extended Dicke-Hubbard lattice whose unit cell consists of a Dicke model coupled to
an atomless cavity. We found in such a periodic lattice the critical point that occurs in a single Dicke model becomes a critical region that is periodically changing with the wavenumber k. In the weak-coupling normal phase of the system we observed a flat band and its corresponding localization that can be controlled by the ground-state SPT. Our work builds the connection between flat band physics and SPT, which may fundamentally broaden the regimes of many-body theory and quantum optics.

Circuit Quantum Electrodynamics Simulator of Flat Band Physics in Lieb lattice

  1. Zi-He Yang,
  2. Yan-Pu Wang,
  3. Zheng-Yuan Xue,
  4. Wan-Li Yang,
  5. Yong Hu,
  6. Jin-Hua Gao,
  7. and Ying Wu
The concept of flat band plays an important role in strongly-correlated many-body physics. However, the demonstration of the flat band physics is highly nontrivial due to intrinsic
limitations in conventional condensed matter materials. Here we propose a circuit quantum electrodynamics simulator of the 2D Lieb lattice exhibiting a flat middle band. By exploiting the simple parametric conversion method, we design a photonic Lieb lattice with \textit{in situ} tunable hopping strengths in a 2D array of coupled superconducting transmissionline resonators. Moreover, the flexibility of our proposal enables the immediate incorporation of both the artificial gauge field and the strong photon-photon interaction in a time- and site-resolved manner. To unambiguously demonstrate the synthesized flat band, we further investigate the observation of the flat band localization of microwave photons through the pumping and the steady-state measurements of only few sites on the lattice. Requiring only current level of technique and being robust against imperfections in realistic circuits, our scheme can be readily tested in experiments and may pave a new way towards the future realization of exotic photonic quantum Hall fluids including anomalous quantum Hall effect and bosonic fractional quantum Hall states without magnetic fields.