Experimentally Accessible Scheme for a Fractional Chern Insulator in Rydberg Atoms
Sebastian Weber, Rukmani Bai, Nastasia Makki, Johannes Mögerle, Thierry Lahaye, Antoine Browaeys, Maria Daghofer, Nicolai Lang, Hans Peter Büchler
Abstract
We present a setup with Rydberg atoms for the realization of a bosonic fractional Chern insulator in artificial matter. The suggested setup relies on Rydberg atoms arranged in a honeycomb lattice, where excitations hop through the lattice by dipolar exchange interactions and can be interpreted as hard-core bosons. The quantum many-body Hamiltonian is studied within exact diagonalization and the densitymatrix renormalization group. We identify experimentally accessible parameters where all signatures indicate the appearance of a fractional state with the same topological properties as the = 1/2 bosonic Laughlin state. We demonstrate an adiabatic ramping procedure, which allows for the preparation of the topological state in a finite system, and demonstrate an experimentally accessible smoking-gun signature for the fractional excitations.