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Breakdown of bosonic Thouless pump due to interaction in a quasiperiodic lattice

Suman Mondal1, Emmanuel Gottlob2, Fabian Heidrich-Meisner3, and Ulrich Schneider2

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Phys. Rev. B 113, 235131 – Published 17 June, 2026

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/6gdw-nmjk

Abstract

We investigate the effect of interparticle interactions on the quantized Thouless pump in the bosonic quasiperiodic Aubry–André model and find that the quantization of the pumped charge breaks down already for weak interactions. Furthermore, the pumped charge undergoes sharp changes as a function of interaction strength that we can attribute to the closing of specific doublon channels. As expected, the quantization revives in the hard-core limit at very large interaction strengths where the bosons are subject to a hard-core constraint. Interestingly, the stability of isolated doublons under the pump depends on the band they are in. For repulsive interactions and a suitably fixed pump period, doublons in the lowest band are pumped stably while doublons in higher bands dissociate during the pump with one particle decaying into a lower band. This asymmetry leads to the decay of the total energy over time, in stark contrast to the typical Floquet heating expected for a driven many-body system.

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Phys. Rev. B 113, 235131– Published 17 June, 2026
  • Received 29 January 2026
  • Revised 15 May 2026
  • Accepted 18 May 2026
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