Feedback cooling of fermionic atoms in optical lattices

Abstract

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.