Fast Hubbard-Thouless Pumping with Local Counterdiabatic Driving

Abstract

Counterdiabatic (CD) driving suppresses the excitations of fast protocols by adding an auxiliary Hamiltonian, but in many-body and topological systems the exact CD term is generally non-local and multi-body. We study this obstruction for Thouless pumping in the Rice-Mele model, first without and then with interactions. For noninteracting fermions, the exact CD term of the pump is non-local, but the variational framework of Sels and Polkovnikov yields accurate nearest-neighbor approximations. For the spinful Rice-Mele chain with onsite and nearest-neighbor repulsion, in the regime where the competition of the two interactions stabilizes quantized pumping, this approach fails: the infinite-temperature variational action only penalizes the CD amplitudes, and the resulting two-parameter nearest-neighbor term does not prevent the pump from breaking down when the cycle time is reduced from $50/t$ to $2/t$. We trace the failure to the structure of the exact many-body gauge potential, whose amplitude for each hop depends on the interaction energy that the hop costs. Resolving the nearest-neighbor currents by this energy, and fixing the coefficients with a ground-state-weighted action, gives a local ansatz with 14 coefficients that keeps the interacting pump quantized for cycle times $T=2/t$ and $T=1/t$, with an accuracy per site that does not degrade between rings of 8 and 12 sites.