Observation of a symmetry-protected topological phase of interacting bosons with Rydberg atoms

Sylvain de Léséleuc, Vincent Lienhard, Pascal Scholl, Daniel Barredo, Sebastian Weber, Nicolai Lang, Hans Peter Büchler, Thierry Lahaye, Antoine Browaeys

The concept of topological phases is a powerful framework for characterizing ground states of quantum many-body systems that goes beyond the paradigm of symmetry breaking. Topological phases can appear in condensed-matter systems naturally, whereas the implementation and study of such quantum many-body ground states in artificial matter require careful engineering. Here, we report the experimental realization of a symmetry-protected topological phase of interacting bosons in a one-dimensional lattice and demonstrate a robust ground state degeneracy attributed to protected zero-energy edge states. The experimental setup is based on atoms trapped in an array of optical tweezers and excited into Rydberg levels, which gives rise to hard-core bosons with an effective hopping generated by dipolar exchange interaction.

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