Nonlinearity-Induced Thouless Pumping in Quasiperiodic Lattices

Abstract

Nonlinear Thouless pumping has been established in periodic lattices; its counterpart in quasiperiodic lattices remains unexplored. Here, we show a nonlinear topological pumping of gap solitons in quasiperiodic lattices where the local nonlinear self-consistent potentials lead to a lattice potential reconstruction; as a result, an emergent topological structure induced by this local reconstruction governs the dynamics of the gap solitons. This enables solitons to adiabatically occupy a single topological band, realizing quasi-quantized Thouless pumping. In addition, the intrinsic lattice perturbations disrupt this band occupation, which drives solitons into a non-quantized drifting regime. However, even in this regime, we also find that the soliton transport is constrained by the topological properties of a critical rational approximant. Tuning nonlinearity or lattice scaling reveals a controllable switching among topological pumping, drifting, and localization. Our work uncovers a mechanism for nonlinearity-induced topological behavior in complex lattice potentials.