Relaxation to an Ideal Chern Band through Coupling to a Markovian Bath

Abstract

We propose a microscopic, weak-coupling mechanism by which generic Chern bands relax toward ideal bands. We consider coupling interacting electrons to a Caldeira-Leggett like Ohmic bosonic bath. Using the Born-Markov approximation, Slater determinant states of a Chern band under Hartree-Fock approximation evolve toward Slater determinant states corresponding to an ideal Chern band. We validate our proposal by performing numerical simulation of a massive Dirac model, showing that the Berry curvature and quantum metric indeed co-evolve to saturate the trace condition. Our proposal provides a concrete dissipative route to realize ideal Chern bands, a fundamental building block for the stabilization of fractional Chern insulators.