Quantized Thouless pumps protected by interactions in dimerized Rydberg tweezer arrays

Abstract: We study Thouless pumps, i.e., adiabatic topological transport, in an interacting spin chain described by the dimerized XXZ Hamiltonian. In the noninteracting case, quantized Thouless pumps can only occur when a topological singularity is encircled adiabatically. In contrast, here we show that, in the presence of interactions, such topological transport can even persist for exotic paths in which the system gets arbitrarily close to the noninteracting singularity. We illustrate the robustness of these exotic Thouless pumps through the behavior of the noninteracting singularity, which for sufficiently strong interactions splits into two singularities separated by a spontaneous antiferromagnetic insulator. We perform a numerical benchmark of these phenomena by means of tensor network simulations of ground-state physics and real-time adiabatic dynamics. Finally, we propose an experimental protocol with Floquet-driven Rydberg tweezer arrays.