Driven Floquet systems can realize topological phases with no static counterparts. These so-called anomalous Floquet topology breaks the bulk-boundary correspondence based on the Chern number. The number of edge modes in each band gap is instead determined by another integer index, a winding number, which is calculated from the time evolution operator of the bulk states within one driving period. While in the non-driven system, Chern markers provide a useful local proxy for the Chern number in the bulk, so far no such local bulk indicator is known for the winding number in Floquet systems. Here we consider two-band models and show that the area enclosed during a Floquet period by an initially localized particle signals the presence of an anomalous phase when it approaches half the unit cell area. In general, we show that at the fine-tuned point of dispersionless dynamics during the micromotion, the enclosed area is quantized and an exact proportionality relation exists between the area and the winding number. Direct detection of anomalous topology in real space could be realized in several quantum simulation platforms, and could be useful for systems with disorder or interactions. Building on the connection between area and winding number, we also show a way to realize arbitrarily high winding numbers.

Topology has emerged as a central concept for classifying phases of matter. The situation is especially rich in periodically driven systems, where anomalous Floquet topological phases break the usual bulk-boundary correspondence between Chern number and edges modes of two-dimensional systems. These phases were so far realized by periodic modulation of the tunneling elements at frequencies near-resonant with respect to the system's bandwidth, a regime where Floquet heating plays a significant role in interacting systems. Here we show that such anomalous Floquet topological phases can also be realized by means of an adiabatic protocol, where the system is always in the instantaneous ground state of the cyclic path in parameter space, like in a Thouless charge pump. We experimentally realize such a state using ultracold atoms in a hexagonal lattice where we adiabatically modulate the lattice geometry, including the sublattice offset. To infer the topology, we use the micromotion area in real-space, which was recently identified as a proxy for the winding number. This way of realizing anomalous phases avoids resonant Floquet heating and imperfect loading into the target state. We demonstrate the robustness of the adiabatic construction by observing the anomalous phase even in the presence of mean-field interactions of magnitude comparable to all other energy scales. These findings are promising for engineering novel topological states in a more robust way.

Quantum many-body scars are energy eigenstates which fail to reproduce thermal expectation values of local observables, in systems where the rest of the many-body spectrum fulfils eigenstate thermalization. Experimental observation of quantum many-body scars has so far been limited to models with multiple scar states evenly spaced in energy. It is thus an interesting question whether even single isolated scars, which theoretically embody the weakest possibile violation of eigenstate thermalization and may be thought to have no detectable impact in experiments, can leave a trace in measurable quantities. Moreover, single scars offer an interesting scenario for exploring the connection between quantum many-body scars and the original notion of scarring in quantum dynamical systems theory. Here we propose protocols to observe single scars in architectures of fixed-frequency, fixed-coupling superconducting qubits. We first adapt known models possessing the desired features into a form particularly suited for the experimental platform. We develop protocols for the implementation of these models, through trotterized sequences of two-qubit cross-resonance interactions, and verify the existence of the approximate scar state in the stroboscopic effective Hamiltonian. Since a single scar cannot be detected from coherent revivals in the dynamics, differently from towers of scar states, we propose and numerically investigate alternative and experimentally-accessible signatures. These include the dynamical response of the scar to local state deformations, to controlled noise, and to the resolution of the Lie-Suzuki-Trotter digitization.

Quantum statistics in low-dimensional systems predicts anyonic particles with fractional exchange statistics which are neither that of bosons nor fermions. While anyons are typically found in two dimensions as excitations of topologically-ordered states of matter, anyon-like exchange statistics has also been discussed in one dimension, for instance, in the context of the anyon-Hubbard model (AHM), the physics of which has recently been observed in experiment [Kwan et al., arXiv:2306.01737; Dhar et al., arXiv:2412.21131; and Bakkali-Hassani et al., arXiv:2602.20421]. The AHM can be formulated in terms of bosons featuring density-dependent Peierls phases, described by a statistical phase angle θ, which controls asymmetric transport and the formation of dynamically bound pairs at finite momentum. Here, we show theoretically that the AHM also hosts exact two-body bound states in the continuum (BICs) for arbitrary θ≠ 0, and genuine three- and four-body bound states. Unlike conventional bound states stabilized by attractive (or repulsive) interactions, which are energetically localized with a large effective mass, these clusters here are bound by a purely kinematic mechanism endowing them with fast chiral transport properties. We provide a simple variational approximation to the three-body bound states and explain their binding mechanism. Moreover, we show that the signatures of three-body bound states in the AHM can be directly probed experimentally from the expansion dynamics starting from three localized particles.

Collective behaviour such as flocking (the collective motion of a spontaneously formed group along a common direction) or aster formation (the binding of opposing flocks, inhibiting each others motion) are intriguing emergent phenomena in active systems with local alignment rules. Until recently, their occurrence was mainly studied for classical systems, a prime example being the active Ising model (AIM), which translates the main ingredients of flocking and aster formation (i.e., alignment and self-propulsion) to a lattice framework. Here we introduce and study a one-dimensional (1D) quantum lattice variant of the AIM, based on ideal bosons with a spin degree of freedom. We find that both the collective behaviours of the 1D classical model, flocking and aster formation, are markedly enhanced by the bosonic quantum statistics. This contrasts with a recent quantum generalization of the AIM based onto hard-core bosons [Khasseh et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 135, 248302 (2025)], where flocking, but neither its quantum-statistical stabilization nor aster states were observed as a consequence of interactions. Moreover, we investigate the competition of this quantum statistical stabilization of collective phases with their suppression by the quantum fluctuations induced by a transverse external magnetic field.

Fractional Chern insulators (FCIs) are lattice analogs of fractional quantum Hall systems, where the interplay of strong interactions with a frustrated tunnelling kinetics leads to the emergence of a gapped ground state with long-range entanglement and anyonic excitations. The highly correlated nature of such systems makes their adiabatic preparation challenging already beyond the minimal system size of two particles. Considering Floquet implementations of the bosonic Harper-Hofstadter-Hubbard model of few photons in superconducting circuits, we design protocols for the driven-dissipative stabilization of its FCI ground state at half filling via quantum bath engineering. Dissipation control is achieved through the coupling to driven leaky cavity modes, which realize a tuneable artificial environment having the Floquet-FCI as its approximate fixed point. For systems of two, three and six particles, we show numerically how the flexibility of the control scheme further allows for the detection of fractional quantum Hall signatures in the stabilized steady states, including bulk incompressibility, Hall response and the trapping of fractional charges. Our results provide a concrete pathway to dissipation-assisted preparation of strongly correlated states in quantum simulators.

We propose a protocol to adiabatically prepare a many-particle fractional quantum Hall fluid of bosonic ultracold atoms exploiting a time-dependent coherent coupling of a strongly interacting atomic state with a large dilute Bose-Einstein condensate. Starting from an empty cloud, atoms with well-defined angular momentum are coherently pumped into the fluid by Raman beams with a Laguerre-Gauss profile. Compared to number-conserving schemes which rely on finite-size-induced topological gaps, we identify an adiabatic path in the Fock space which avoids crossing topological phase transitions and thus maintains a sizable adiabatic gap open at all times. The efficiency of our preparation protocol is numerically assessed for typical experimental parameters up to particle numbers that largely exceed the experimental state-of-the-art. The crucial advantage of including an anharmonic confinement is finally highlighted.

Quantum geometry has emerged as a guiding principle across atomic and condensed-matter physics, shaping the topological responses of Bloch bands and the stability of the correlated phases they host. Beyond two-band models, however, closed-form expressions for both the spectrum and the quantum geometry are rare. Here we provide such expressions for a paradigmatic four-band model that has recently been realized experimentally with ultracold atoms, photons and in superconducting circuits: the Harper-Hofstadter model at quarter flux, describing charged particles on a two-dimensional square lattice subjected to a uniform magnetic field. We achieve this by first showing that the model possesses a sublattice symmetry, which renders its Bloch Hamiltonian anti-block-diagonal allowing us to derive the spectrum and the eigenstates analytically. From that we also obtain closed-form expressions for the full quantum geometric tensor (QGT), including both the Berry curvature and the quantum metric, for all the bands of the model. For this purpose we first derive a general expression for the QGT for sublattice-symmetric systems in terms of contributions from the individual sublattice sectors. Finally, we evaluate fractional-Chern-insulator stability criteria analytically and quantify the lowest band of the quarter-flux Harper-Hofstadter model to be a nearly ideal Chern band.

Floquet engineering, the control of a quantum system by means of time-periodic driving, allows to modify the properties of the system so that it becomes described by an approximate effective time-independent Hamiltonian. However, in the presence of interactions the stabilization of interesting many-body ground states of such effective Hamiltonians is possible only on a certain time scale, beyond which Floquet heating sets in, as it results from unwanted driving induced resonant excitation. Moreover, already the preparation of such states is challenged by excitations due to imperfect adiabatic dynamics, especially when a phase transition has to be passed. Here, we propose a general dissipative strategy for the preparation and stabilization of effective ground states that are protected by an energy gap. Our approach relies on coupling the driven system to a thermal bath, the properties of which are chosen so that it both suppresses Floquet heating and guides the system into a non-equilibrium steady state with a large occupation of the effective ground-state, but generally non-thermal occupations of excited states of the effective Hamiltonian. We use the Floquet-Born-Markov master equation to verify the proposed strategy for the example of a strongly driven Bose-Hubbard chain with an effective gapped Mott-insulator ground state.

Fractional statistics give rise to quantum behaviors that differ fundamentally from those of bosons and fermions. While two-dimensional anyons play a major role in strongly correlated systems and topological quantum computing, the nature of their one-dimensional (1D) counterparts remains the subject of intense debate, with renewed interest fueled by recent experimental progress. Theoretically, 1D anyons are predicted to host exotic many-body phases and quantum phase transitions, yet experimental signatures have remained elusive. Using ultracold atoms in an optical lattice, we prepare two-body ground states of the 1D anyon-Hubbard model by combining Hamiltonian engineering via quasiperiodic drives and adiabatic state manipulation. We uncover the effects of statistical interactions that lead to pseudo-fermionization and to the formation of chiral bound states when particles remain close together. Our results establish a link between lattice and continuum realizations of anyon models, and mark important steps towards the precise control of 1D anyons in both equilibrium and out-of-equilibrium settings.

Quantum point contacts (QPCs) are essential tools for transport experiments in solid-state systems, enabling the detection of fractional charges and anyonic braiding statistics. Realizing analogous transport setups in isolated quantum-simulation platforms, such as ultracold atoms, remains challenging, since it typically requires coupling to external reservoirs. Here we show that the scattering properties of chiral edge states at a QPC can instead be extracted directly from the stationary edge currents of an isolated, reservoir-free lattice system. Exploiting the sensitivity of this scattering to Aharonov-Bohm-type phases, we propose an equilibrium protocol to detect local magnetic fluxes from ground-state edge currents. We further introduce a dynamical scheme, robust against finite temperature and particle-number fluctuations, based on the post-quench evolution following a sudden potential-bias removal. Since anyonic excitations are themselves associated with a local, quantized magnetic flux, our approach should extend to probing anyonic statistical phases in quantum-engineered platforms.

A mathematical description of the reduced dynamics of an open quantum system can often be given in terms of a completely positive and trace preserving (CPTP) map, also known as quantum channel. In a seminal work by Wolf et al. [Phys. Rev. Lett. 101, 150402 (2008)], it was shown that deciding whether a given quantum channel was generated from an underlying effective Markovian dynamics, with time-independent generator of Lindblad form, is generally an NP-hard problem. The difficulty is related to the fact that one has to search through all possible branches of the operator logarithm of the map, in order to identify, if any of the resulting effective generators is of Lindblad form. In this work we show that in cases where one has access to the full reduced dynamics at all previous times (the dynamical map) one can significantly facilitate the search for an effective generator by making use of Floquet theory. By performing a spectral unwinding such that the effective micromotion is minimized, the effective Floquet generator is often an excellent candidate for an effective generator of Lindblad form. This significantly reduces the complexity of the search for an effective generator of Lindblad form in many (though not all) cases. Our results are relevant for engineering Floquet Lindbladians in complex many-body systems.

Bosonic Bogoliubov de Gennes (BBdG) Hamiltonians describe the excitations of weakly interacting Bose condensates as well as photonic systems under parametric driving. Their topological features have been studied mainly by utilizing a generalized symplectic version of the Berry curvature and related Chern numbers. However, a full characterization of geometrical features in BBdG systems is still lacking. Here, we propose a symplectic quantum geometric tensor (SQGT), whose imaginary part leads to the previously studied symplectic Berry curvature, while the real part gives rise to a symplectic quantum metric, providing a natural distance measure in the space of bosonic Bogoliubov modes. The SQGT is directly related to observable properties of BBdG systems. We show how to measure all components of the SQGT by extracting excitation rates in response to periodic modulations of the systems' parameters. Moreover, we connect the symplectic Berry curvature to a generalized symplectic anomalous velocity term for Bogoliubov-Bloch wave packets. We test our results for a bosonic Bogoliubov-Haldane model.

We discuss the preparation of topological insulator states with fermionic ultracold atoms in optical lattices by means of measurement-based Markovian feedback control. The designed measurement and feedback operators induce an effective dissipative channel that stabilizes the desired insulator state, either in an exact way or approximately in the case where additional experimental constraints are assumed. Successful state preparation is demonstrated in one-dimensional insulators as well as for Haldane's Chern insulator, by calculating the fidelity between the target ground state and the steady state of the feedback-modified master equation. The fidelity is obtained numerically through exact diagonalization or via time evolution of the system with moderate sizes. For larger 2D systems, we compare the mean occupation of the single-particle eigenstates for the ground and steady state computed through mean-field kinetic equations.

Time-local quantum master equations that describe open quantum systems beyond the limit of ultraweak system-bath coupling are often not of Gorini-Kossakowski-Sudarshan-Lindblad (GKSL) form. Prominent examples are the Redfield equation approximating general open quantum systems and the Hu-Paz-Zhang equation precisely describing a damped harmonic oscillator. In this study, we demonstrate that not only the former but also the latter can be brought to pseudo-Lindblad form. This form features a dissipator resembling that of a GKSL equation, with the distinction that some of the terms have negative weights. Moreover, we systematically investigate transformations that leave the dissipator of pseudo-Lindblad equations unchanged, while changing the relative weight between its positive and negative terms. These can be used to minimize the weights of the negative terms, which is optimal both for the convergence of a recently developed quantum-trajectory unraveling of pseudo-Lindblad equations and the truncation of the negative terms to obtain a GKSL equation.

Floquet engineering is an important tool for realizing topologically nontrivial band structures for charge-neutral atoms in optical lattices. However, the preparation of a topological-band-insulator-type state of fermions, with one nontrivial quasi-energy band filled completely and the others empty, is challenging as a result of both driving induced heating as well as imperfect adiabatic state preparation (with the latter induced by the unavoidable gap closing when passing the topological transition). An alternative procedure that has been proposed is to prepare such states dissipatively, i.e. as a steady state that emerges when coupling the system to reservoirs. Here we discuss a concrete scheme that couples the system to a weakly interacting Bose-condensate given by second atomic species acting as a heat bath. Our strategy relies on the engineering of the potential for the bath particles, so that they occupy weakly coupled tubes perpendicular to the two-dimensional system. Using Floquet-Born-Markov theory, we show that the resulting nonequilibrium steady state of the driven-dissipative system approximates a topological insulator. We even find indications for the approximate stabilization of an anomalous Floquet topological insulator, a state that is impossible to realize in equilibrium.

Recently, Nathan and Rudner derived a Gorini-Kossakowski-Sudarshan-Lindblad master equation from the Redfield equation. The claim is that the level of approximation is equal to that of the Redfield equation. Here we benchmark the Nathan-Rudner equation (NRE) against the exact solution of a damped harmonic oscillator, and we compare its performance to that of the time-dependent Redfield equation (RE). We find that which of the equations performs better depends on the regime considered. It turns out that the short-time dynamics is generally much better captured by the RE, whereas the NRE delivers results comparable to those of the rotating-wave approximation. For the steady state, in the high-temperature limit the RE again performs better and its solution approaches the exact result for ultrahigh temperatures. Nevertheless, here also the NRE constitutes a good approximation. In the low-temperature limit, in turn, the NRE provides a better approximation than the RE. For too strong coupling, here the RE might even fail completely by predicting unphysical behavior.

We theoretically propose a quantum simulation scheme for the toric-code Hamiltonian, the paradigmatic model of a quantum spin liquid, based on time-periodic driving. We develop a hybrid continuous-digital strategy that exploits the commutativity of different terms in the target Hamiltonian. It allows one to realize the required four-body interactions in a nonperturbative way, attaining strong coupling and the suppression of undesired processes. In addition, we design an optimal protocol for preparing the topologically ordered ground states with high fidelity. A proof-of-principle implementation of a topological device and its use to simulate the topological phase transition are also discussed. The proposed scheme finds natural implementation in architectures of superconducting qubits with tuneable couplings.

Out of thermal equilibrium, bosonic quantum systems can Bose-condense away from the ground state, featuring a macroscopic occupation of an excited state or even of multiple states in the so-called Bose-selection scenario. In previous work, a theory was developed that predicts, in which states a driven-dissipative ideal Bose gas condenses. Here, we address the inverse problem: Given a target state with desired condensate fractions in certain single-particle states, how can this configuration be achieved by tuning available control parameters? Which type of experimental setup allows for flexible condensation control? We solve these problems, on the one hand, by proposing a Bose `condenser', experimentally implementable in a superconducting circuit, where targeted Bose condensation into eigenstates of a chain of resonators is driven through the coupling to artificial quantum baths, realized via auxiliary two-level systems. On the other, we develop a theory to solve the inverse problem based on linear programming methods. We further discuss the engineering of transition points between different Bose condensation configurations, which may find application for amplification, heat-flow control, and the design of highly-structured quantum baths.

Low-dimensional quantum systems can host anyons, particles with exchange statistics that are neither bosonic nor fermionic. However, the physics of anyons in one dimension remains largely unexplored. In this work, we realize Abelian anyons in one dimension with arbitrary exchange statistics using ultracold atoms in an optical lattice, where we engineer the statistical phase through a density-dependent Peierls phase. We explore the dynamical behavior of two anyons undergoing quantum walks and observe the anyonic Hanbury Brown-Twiss effect as well as the formation of bound states without on-site interactions. Once interactions are introduced, we observe spatially asymmetric transport in contrast to the symmetric dynamics of bosons and fermions. Our work forms the foundation for exploring the many-body behavior of one-dimensional anyons.