Nonlinear Thouless Pumping of Solitons Across an Impurity

Abstract

The nonlinear Thouless pumping is an exciting frontier of topological physics. While recent works have revealed the quantized motion of solitons in Thouless pumps, the interplay between the topology, nonlinearity and disorder remains largely unexplored. Here, we investigate the nonlinear Thouless pumping of solitons in the presence of an impurity in the context of a Bose-Einstein condensate. Using both the Gross-Pitaevskii equation and Lagrangian variational approach, we analyze the interaction between a moving soliton and an impurity. Without the pump, the soliton can pass through a light impurity, but gets trapped by the impurity with large mass. In marked contrast, we find the soliton in Thouless pumps can always transit through the impurity, and its motion is topologically quantized. Our result explicitly showcases the robustness of topological soliton pumping against microscopic imperfections, and opens a new perspective in the information processing with solitons.