Nonlinearity-induced Thouless pumping of solitons

Abstract: It has recently been theoretically predicted and experimentally observed that a soliton resulting from nonlinearity can be pumped across an integer or fractional number of unit cells as a system parameter is slowly varied over a pump period. Nonlinear Thouless pumping is now understood as the flow of instantaneous Wannier functions, ruling out the possibility of pumping a soliton across a nonzero number of unit cells over one cycle when a corresponding Wannier function does not exhibit any flow, i.e., when the corresponding Bloch band that the soliton bifurcates from is topologically trivial. Here we surprisingly find an anomalous nonlinear Thouless pump where the displacement of a soliton over one cycle is twice the Chern number of the Bloch band from which the soliton bifurcates. We show that the breakdown of the correspondence between the displacement of a soliton and the Chern number arises from the emergence of a new branch of stable soliton solutions mainly consisting of two neighboring instantaneous Wannier functions. Furthermore, we find a nonlinearity-induced integer quantized Thouless pump, allowing a soliton to travel across one unit cell during a pump period, even when the corresponding band is topologically trivial. Our results open the door to studying nonlinearity-induced Thouless pumping of solitons.