R ES E A RC H

◥ (31), which was originally formulated to describe

RESEARCH ARTICLE fermionic particles hopping on a dimerized lat-
tice. Our bosonic setup gives rise to two distinct
phases of a bulk–half-filled chain: a trivial one
QUANTUM SIMULATION with a single ground state and an excitation gap;
and an SPT phase, with a fourfold ground state

Observation of a symmetry-protected degeneracy due to edge states, and a bulk ex-

citation gap. After an adiabatic preparation of
a bulk–half-filled chain, we detect the ground
topological phase of interacting state degeneracy in the topological phase and
probe the zero-energy edge states. Furthermore,

bosons with Rydberg atoms we experimentally demonstrate the robustness

of the SPT phase under a perturbation respect-
ing the protecting symmetry and show that this
Sylvain de Léséleuc1*†, Vincent Lienhard1*, Pascal Scholl1, Daniel Barredo1, robustness cannot be explained at the single-
Sebastian Weber2*, Nicolai Lang2*, Hans Peter Büchler2, particle level, a feature that distinguishes our
Thierry Lahaye1, Antoine Browaeys1 system from noninteracting SPT phases.

The concept of topological phases is a powerful framework for characterizing ground SSH model for hard-core bosons
states of quantum many-body systems that goes beyond the paradigm of symmetry The SSH model is formulated on a one-dimensional
breaking. Topological phases can appear in condensed-matter systems naturally, whereas lattice with an even number of sites N and stag-
the implementation and study of such quantum many-body ground states in artificial gered hopping of particles (Fig. 1A). It is conve-
matter require careful engineering. Here, we report the experimental realization of a nient to divide the lattice into two sublattices:

Downloaded from https://www.science.org on February 27, 2024

symmetry-protected topological phase of interacting bosons in a one-dimensional lattice A ¼ f1; 3; …; N  1g, involving odd lattice sites,
and demonstrate a robust ground state degeneracy attributed to protected zero-energy and B ¼ f2; 4; …; N g, with even sites. Then, a
edge states. The experimental setup is based on atoms trapped in an array of optical particle on site i of one sublattice can hop to a
tweezers and excited into Rydberg levels, which gives rise to hard-core bosons with an site j of the other sublattice with a hopping
effective hopping generated by dipolar exchange interaction. amplitude Jij (we do not restrict the system
to nearest-neighbor hopping). The many-body

T
he concept of symmetry breaking can be
used to characterize a variety of quantum
phases. Topological quantum phases, how-
ever, do not fit into this paradigm. The
most prominent example of a topological
phase is the integer quantum Hall state with its
robust edge states, giving rise to a quantized
Hall conductance (1). The prediction of topo-
logical insulators (2) revealed another class of
topological states of matter, denoted as symmetry-
protected topological phases (SPTs). They occur in
systems that display an excitation gap in the bulk
(i.e., bulk insulators) and are invariant under a
global symmetry. Their defining property is that
the ground state at zero temperature cannot be
transformed into a conventional insulating state
upon deformations of the system that do not close
the excitation gap or violate the symmetry. In
particular, the zero-energy edge states are ro-
bust to any perturbation commuting with the
symmetry operators.
SPT phases were first predicted and observed
in materials in which the interaction between
electrons can be effectively neglected (3, 4). In
this specific case of noninteracting fermions,
SPT phases can be classified based on the action
of the Hamiltonian on a single particle (5, 6).
Thus, the appearance of robust edge states is
fully understood from the single-particle eigen-
states. This notable simplification motivated ex-
1
Laboratoire Charles Fabry, Institut d’Optique Graduate
School, CNRS, Université Paris-Saclay, 91127 Palaiseau Cedex,
France. 2Institute for Theoretical Physics III and Center for
Integrated Quantum Science and Technology, University
of Stuttgart, 70550 Stuttgart, Germany.
*These authors contributed equally to this work.
†Corresponding author. Email: sylvain.leseleuc@institutoptique.fr
perimental studies of topological phenomena at
the single-particle level in classical systems such
as coupled mechanical oscillators (7, 8), radio-
frequency circuits (9), optical devices (10–13),
and plasmonic systems (14, 15). Similar studies
were conducted also in quantum systems such
as ultracold atoms (16–22), where atomic inter-
actions were either negligible (16–21) or used
only to fill up Bloch bands (22), but the observed
physics could be explained by a noninteract-
ing model.
By contrast, the ground state of noninteract-
ing bosons is a Bose-Einstein condensate. There-
fore, bosonic SPT phases only appear in systems
with interactions between the particles. Their
classification requires the analysis of the quan-
tum many-body ground state and is based on
group cohomology (23, 24). A notable example
is the Haldane phase of the antiferromagnetic
spin-1 chain (25), which has been experimentally
observed in some solid-state materials (26, 27). In
the context of artificial matter, interactions have
been introduced between bosonic particles in a
system with a topological band structure (28, 29),
but studies were restricted to the two-body limit,
still far from the many-body regime.
Here, we report the realization of a many-
body SPT phase of interacting bosonic particles
in an artificial system. Our setup is based on
a staggered one-dimensional chain of Rydberg
atoms, each restricted to a two-level system, res-
onantly coupled together by the dipolar interac-
tion (30). We use this system to encode hard-core
bosons—i.e., bosonic particles with infinite on-
site interaction energy–coherently hopping along
the chain. The system then realizes a bosonic
version of the Su-Schrieffer-Heeger (SSH) model
Hamiltonian is
X
H¼ Jij ½b†i bj þ b†j bi  ð1Þ
i∈A;j∈B
b†i
with (bi ) being the creation (annihilation)
operator of a particle on site i. In the original
formulation of the SSH model, the particles
are noninteracting fermions. Here we con-
sider hard-core bosons for which the operators
b†i (bi ) satisfy bosonic commutation relations
on different sites i ≠ j, and additionally the
hard-core constraint ðb†i Þ2 ¼ 0, as two bosons
cannot occupy the same site i. In our realization,
the nearest-neighbor hoppings are dominating—
with J denoting the strong link and J′ the weak
link, i.e., jJ′j < jJj (Fig. 1, C and D)—and are
sufficient to describe the qualitative behavior of
the model. For quantitative comparison between
theory and experiment, we do not restrict our
system to the nearest-neigbor approximation.
At the single-particle level, the spectrum of
the Hamiltonian in Eq. 1, shown in Fig. 2A, is
obtained by diagonalizing the coupling matrix
Jij . It displays two bands separated by a spec-
tral gap 2ðjJj  jJ′jÞ; depending on the end
links of the chain, there may or may not be in-
gap localized zero-energy edge modes. There are
two such modes for a chain ending with weak
links J′ (topological configuration, Fig. 1C) and
none if the chain ends with strong links J
(trivial configuration, Fig. 1D). The topology
of the bands emerges from the sublattice (or
chiral) symmetry of the SSH Hamiltonian (5, 6),
which notably constrains the hopping matrix
Jij to connect only sites of different sublattices—
e.g., next–nearest-neighbor hoppings Ji;iþ2 ¼ J″
are forbidden (see below for the experimental
realization). The existence and degeneracy of

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R ES E A RC H | R E S EA R C H A R T I C LE

edge modes are topologically protected from
any perturbation that does not break the sub-
lattice symmetry. These single-particle proper-
ties of the coupling matrix Jij defining the SSH
model have been observed in many platforms,
such as ultracold atoms (32, 33), polaritons in an
array of micropillars (14), or mechanical gran-
ular chains (34).
We now turn to the properties of the quan-
tum many-body ground state corresponding to
a bulk–half-filled chain. For noninteracting fer-
mions, the properties of the SSH chain follow
from the Fermi sea picture based on the single-
particle eigenstates: In the trivial configuration
one obtains a single insulating ground state,
whereas in the topological configuration, (i) an
excitation gap appears in the bulk, and (ii) the
ground state is fourfold degenerate as the two
zero-energy edge modes can be either empty or
occupied. For interacting bosons, the descrip-
tion of the many-body ground state is much
more challenging. In the special case with only
nearest-neighbor hoppings J and J′, the bosonic
of individually trapped 87Rb atoms (37–39)
(Fig. 1, C and D). The motion of the atoms is
frozen during our experiment, occurring in a
few microseconds. Coupling between the atoms
is achieved, despite the large interatomic distance
(~10 µm), by preparing the atoms in Rydberg
states for which the dipole-dipole coupling is en-
hanced to a few megahertz (30, 40).
We first prepare each atom in a Rydberg s-level,
j60S1=2 ; mJ ¼ 1=2i , using a two-photon stimu-
lated Raman adiabatic passage (STIRAP) with an
efficiency of 95% (35). From there, the atom can
be coherently transferred to a Rydberg p-level,
j60P1=2 ; mJ ¼ 1=2i, by using a microwave field
tuned to the transition between the two Rydberg
levels (E0 =h ∼ 16:7 GHz). The detuning from the
transition is denoted Dmw , and the Rabi frequency
is Wmw =ð2pÞ ∼ 0:1 to 20 MHz. We denote the state
with all Rydberg atoms in the s-level as the
“vacuum” j 0i of the many-body system, whereas
a Rydberg atom at site i excited in a p-level is
described as a bosonic particle, b†i j0i. Because
each Rydberg atom can only be excited once to
Rydberg p-level is lost from the structure. The
detection errors are at the few percent level (35).
For each experimental run, we thus obtain the
occupancy of each site, which is then averaged
by repeating the experiment every ~0.3 s.
To implement the sub-lattice symmetry, we use
the angular dependence of the dipolar coupling
Jij ¼ d 2 ð3cos2 qij  1Þ=R3ij with d the transition
dipole moment between the two Rydberg lev-
els. The hopping depends on the separation
Rij , as well as the angle qij with respect to the
quantization axis defined by the magnetic field
Bz ≃ 50 G. In Fig. 1A, we show the measured
angular dependence, p vanishing
ffiffiffi at the “magic
angle” qm ¼ arccosð1= 3Þ ≈ 54:7°, which allows
us to suppress the hopping along this direction.
By arranging the atoms in two subchains aligned
along the magic angle, we satisfy the sublattice
symmetry. The measured nearest-neighbor
couplings are J=h ¼ 2:42ð2Þ MHz and J 0 =h ¼
0:92ð2Þ MHz, in full agreement with numer-
ical determination of the pair potential (41). The
dipolar interaction also gives rise to longer-range

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many-body ground states for hard-core bosons
can be derived via a Jordan-Wigner transfor-
mation from the fermionic ones and inherits
the properties of a bulk excitation gap and a
fourfold ground state degeneracy in the topo-
logical configuration (35). These properties are
robust against the addition of extra terms to the
Hamiltonian as long as the bulk gap remains
finite and the protecting symmetry is respected,
as required to describe a state in the SPT phase.
Here, two symmetries have to be respected: the
particle number conservation and the symmetry
represented by the anti-unitary operator
Y
N
the p-level, we obtain the hard-core constraint
naturally. The resonant dipolar interaction oc-
curring between the s- and p-levels of two
Rydberg atoms at site i and j gives rise to hop-
ping of these particles (30) (Fig. 1B); we use this
to engineer the hopping matrix Jij. At the end of
the experiment, we deexcite atoms in the Rydberg
s-level to the electronic ground state and detect
them by fluorescence imaging; an atom in the
A C
hopping on the order of ~0.2 MHz to third
neighbors, which do not qualitatively change
the properties of our system but are fully taken
into account for quantitative comparison between
theory and experiment.
Single-particle spectrum
As a benchmark of our system, we first study
the properties of a single particle in the chain.

SB ¼ ½bi þ b†i K ð2Þ

i¼1

where bi þ b†i is a particle-hole transformation

and K denotes the complex conjugation. Indeed,
the general classification of the bosonic SPT
phases (23, 24) allows for a topological and a
trivial phase for the symmetry described by Eq. 2.
Moreover, in contrast to the chiral symmetry D
(protecting the single-particle properties and
the fermionic SPT phase), next–nearest-neighbor
B
hoppings J″ ¼ Ji;iþ2 are symmetry allowed, i.e.,
½H; S B  ¼ 0 even when including J″. We will
demonstrate this fundamental difference by
engineering a perturbation that shifts the edge
modes away from zero energy at the single-
particle level but preserves the ground state
degeneracy in the bosonic many-body system.
In general, our protecting symmetries allow for
arbitrary and even complex hopping terms and Fig. 1. Bosonic SSH model. (A) Dimerized one-dimensional lattice and the two sublattices A and B.
interactions such as Zi Zj with Zi ¼ 1  2b†i bi . The staggered nearest-neighbor hopping energies are denoted as J and J′ with jJj > jJ′j. (B) Each
However, a relaxation of the hard-core constraint lattice site hosts a Rydberg atom with two relevant levels: 60S1=2 being the vacuum state j0i
and introducing interaction terms b†i b†i bi bi vio- and 60P1=2 describing a bosonic particle b†i j0i. The dipolar exchange interaction provides the hopping
lates the symmetry and leads to a splitting of the mechanism. Inset in (A): Angular dependence of the hopping amplitude measured between two
ground state degeneracy (36). sites; filled (empty) circle: positive (negative) amplitude. The amplitude vanishes and changes
sign at the angle qm ≃ 54:7°. The solid line is the theoretical prediction of the angular dependence.
Experimental realization with Standard error of the mean (SEM) of the data is smaller than the symbol size. (C and D) Single-shot
Rydberg atoms fluorescence images of the atoms assembled in the artificial structure for the topological (C) and
Our realization of the bosonic SSH model is per- the trivial (D) configuration. The chain is tilted by the angle qm to cancel couplings between sites in
formed on an artificial structure with N = 14 sites the same sublattice.

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R ES E A RC H | R E S EA R C H A R T I C LE

The single-particle spectrum is probed by mi-
crowave spectroscopy (Fig. 2A). Initializing the
vacuum state j0i with all Rydberg atoms in the
s-level, a weak microwave probe with a Rabi
frequency Wmw =ð2pÞ ¼ 0:2 MHz applied for a
time t ¼ 0:75 ms can lead to the coherent cre-
ation of a particle only if an eigenstate energy
matches the microwave detuning Dmw and if
this state is coupled to j0i by the microwave
field. We show in Fig. 2B the site-resolved
probability of finding a particle on a given site
for the two different chain configurations. In
both cases, we observe a clear signal for ℏDmw <
jJ′j  jJj from lower band modes delocalized
along the chain. States in the upper band are
not observed as the microwave coupling from
j0i to these states is very small. Only in the topo-
logical configuration do we observe an addi-
tional signal localized at the boundaries around
zero energy, corresponding to the two edge
modes. The finite width of the signal is caused
by microwave power broadening (35). In Fig.
2C, we quantitatively show the localization of
For any finite chain, the left and right edge
modes hybridize to form symmetric and anti-
symmetric states with an energy difference
Ehyb º J′jJ′=JjN , which breaks the degeneracy
of the edge modes but decreases exponentially
with the chain length N . This remains negli-
gible compared to our experimental time scale
for a long chain of 14 sites (Ehyb ≃ h  20 kHz),
but the hybridization is observable for smaller
chains. Notably, it gives rise to a coherent trans-
fer of a particle between the two boundaries
without involving the bulk modes, as sketched
in Fig. 2D. To observe this, we prepare a par-
ticle on the leftmost site using a combination
of an addressing beam and microwaves sweeps
(42), and then let the system evolve freely. We
show in Fig. 2E the experimental results for
three chains of four, six, and eight sites. The
energy Ehyb is determined from the frequency
of transfer and exhibits the expected exponen-
tial scaling (Fig. 2F), in excellent agreement
with theoretical calculations, including the full
hopping matrix Jij (35).
logical configuration exhibits four degenerate
ground states corresponding to the bulk half-
filled, and which are characterized by zero, one,
or two additional particles mainly residing at
the edges. To prepare the ground state, we per-
form a microwave adiabatic sweep (Fig. 3A),
where the final detuning Df plays the role of a
chemical potential, tuning the number of par-
ticles loaded in the chain. From a theoretical
analysis simulating the full time-evolution, we
expect that our ramping procedure ending at
a final detuning jℏDf j < jJj  jJ′j prepares the
ground state with high fidelity (35).
We present in Fig. 3, D and E, the depen-
dence of the local density of particles on Df : The
bulk sites’ occupancy (blue symbols) exhibits
a characteristic plateau at half-filling within
the single-particle gap. The fluctuations of the
number of particles in the bulk are strongly
reduced with a measured probability of 48%
to find exactly six particles on the 12 bulk sites
[mainly decreased from 100% by detection er-
rors (35)]. The local bulk properties are inde-

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edge modes at the boundary by postselecting
experimental runs where at most one particle
was created. We observe that the particle pop-
ulates significantly only the leftmost and right-
most sites, and their second neighbors, as
expected from the sublattice symmetry (edge
states have support on one of the two subchains
only) and in good agreement with a parameter-
free calculation (black crosses) (35).
Many-body ground state
We now turn to the study of the many-body
system. In Fig. 3, B and C, we show the full
energy spectrum in the trivial and topological
configurations, calculated using exact diagonal-
ization and ordered by increasing number of
particles (35). In the trivial case, there is a single
ground state at half-filling. By contrast, the topo-
pendent of the topology of the setup, but the
situation is drastically different for the edge
occupancy: In the trivial configuration, the edge
sites behave as the bulk sites, whereas for the
topological chain, the boundaries remain depleted
for Df < 0 and exhibit a sharp transition to full
occupancy for Df > 0. This behavior is con-
sistent with the expected ground state degen-
eracy. Finally, the small increase in the bulk

A B C

D E F

Fig. 2. Single-particle properties. (A) Single-particle spectrum for the
trivial and the topological configuration probed by microwave spectroscopy.
Right: A selection of single-particle wave functions. (B) Experimental
site-resolved spectra showing the averaged occupancy of each site as a
function of Dmw . The lower-band bulk states are always observed, whereas
states in the upper band are not visible as their microwave coupling to j 0i is
either weak or completely inhibited. Edge states at zero energy appear only
for the topological configuration. The white dashed lines indicate the
calculated gap. (C) Spatial distribution of the edge states, observed (red bars)
and calculated (black crosses), showing an exponential localization on the
edges. The dashed line indicates the 2% noise level caused by preparation
and detection errors. (D) Particle transfer between the two edges. A particle
on the left edge is essentially a superposition of the symmetric and
antisymmetric zero-energy modes, split in energy by Ehyb owing to the
hybridization for finite chains. (E) Observation of the transfer for chains of
N = 4, 6, and 8 sites after injecting a particle on the leftmost site. (F) From the
transfer frequency, we obtain the hybridization energy Ehyb (red circles)
and compare it to calculations, keeping only nearest-neighbor hoppings
(dashed line) and including the full dipolar interaction (solid line).
All theoretical results are obtained by diagonalizing the coupling matrix.

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R ES E A RC H | R E S EA R C H A R T I C LE

density around Df ¼ 0, even in the trivial con- The picture remains valid even in our regime from the trivial state by a finite value of the string
figuration, is caused by preparation errors cre- where jJj ≃ 2:6jJ′j. We measure a large and neg- order parameters C x and C z (23, 43) with
ative density-density correlation C z ð2i; 2i þ 1Þ ¼

ating lattice defects. A defect gives rise to two
chains, one of which starts with a weak link, and
thus supports a zero-energy edge state, which
gets populated when Df becomes positive. In-
cluding preparation and detection errors in the
simulation (solid lines) gives an excellent agree-
ment with the experimental data (35).
We gain more insight into the many-body
state by analyzing the correlations between par-
ticles, which we can measure because our de-
tection scheme provides the full site-resolved
particle distribution. In the strongly dimerized
regime jJj≫jJ′j, we expect the ∼ N =2 particles in
the bulk to be highly correlated as they can
minimize their energy by each delocalizing on a
dimer (two sites connected by a strong link J ).
h i
X
N 2
hZ2i Z2iþ1 i ≃ 0:67ð1Þ with Zi ¼ 1  2b†i bi , cor- ip2 Zk
responding to a suppressed probability of finding z
Cstring ¼  Z2 e k¼3 ZN1
two particles on the same dimer. We also access ð3Þ
the off-diagonal correlations, C x ði; jÞ ¼ hXi Xj i
with Xi ¼ bi þ b†i measuring the coherence be- x
and in analogy for Cstring . Indeed, we measure a
tween two sites i and j , by applying a strong finite string order in the topological phase with
microwave pulse before the detection, which z
Cstring ¼ 0:11ð2Þ and Cstring
x
¼ 0:05ð2Þ, whereas in
rotates the local measurement basis around the the trivial phase they are consistent with zero,
Bloch sphere. We obtainC x ð2i; 2i þ 1Þ ≃ þ0:48ð2Þ, z
e.g., Cstring ¼ 0:02ð3Þ. All measured correlators
indicating that a particle is coherently and sym- are in good agreement with simulations.
metrically delocalized on two sites, forming a We now demonstrate the degeneracy of the
dimer. Furthermore, our detection scheme allows many-body ground state in the topological phase
us to determine string order parameters. For our and the bulk excitation gap. We first prepare
experimental implementation, the theory pre- a six-particle many-body ground state with the
dicts that we can distinguish the topological state bulk at half-filling but empty edge states by an

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Fig. 3. Preparing the many-body phase at half-filling. (A) Microwave
sweep with time-varying Rabi frequency Wmw and detuning Dmw ; the latter
ends at Df . (B and C) Energy spectrum of the many-body system in
the trivial (top) and the topological (bottom) configuration for different
particle numbers. The trivial chain exhibits a single gapped ground state
with seven particles, whereas the topological configuration exhibits a
fourfold degeneracy involving six, seven (twofold degenerate), and eight
particles. Starting from the empty chain, the microwave adiabatic sweep
loads hard-core bosons in the lattice and prepares the lowest-energy
states. (D and E) We measure the occupancy of bulk (blue) and edge sites
(green and brown) as a function of the final detuning Df . Solid lines are
the results of simulations, without free parameters, including preparation
and detection errors. For a sweep ending in the single-particle gap
(between the dashed vertical lines), the bulk of the chain is half-filled.
Bosons are loaded in the edge sites of the topological configuration when
Df > 0. The error bars represent SEMs.

Fig. 4. Probing the SPT phase degeneracy and bulk excitation gap.
(A) A microwave sweep ending at Df =ð2pÞ ¼ 1 MHz first prepares the
many-body ground state with six particles, and we then apply for 2 µs a
microwave probe with a Rabi frequency Wmw =ð2pÞ ¼ 0:3 MHz and a variable
detuning Dmw . (B) Magnified view of the bottom of the energy spectrum
of a chain in the topological configuration. Starting from the ground state
with six particles (solid circle), we can (i) reach one of the other
degenerate ground states by adding a particle at the edge for zero energy
cost. In addition, we can probe the bulk excitation gap by (ii) adding a
particle to, or (iii) removing a particle from, the bulk. (C) Measured
occupancy of bulk (blue circles) and edge sites (green and brown circles)
showing the three expected transitions. Error bars are SEMs.

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R ES E A RC H | R E S EA R C H A R T I C LE
Fig. 5. Perturbation and
robustness of the bosonic
topological phase. (A) The
rightmost site is shifted
upward to give a finite hopping
amplitude J″ to the second
neighbor. (B and C) Probability
of finding a particle in the left
(green circles) and right
(brown circles) edge sites
when scanning the detuning
Dmw of the microwave probe.
The experiment is performed
either on (B) an initially empty chain to observe the energy difference between the two single-particle
edge modes caused by the perturbation J″ or (C) on the many-body ground state with a
half-filled bulk (six particles in a 14-site chain) to observe the protection of the ground state
degeneracy. Solid lines are Gaussian fits from which we extract an energy difference of 0:21ð1Þ MHz
in (B) and 0:03ð2Þ MHz in (C).
adiabatic sweep ending at Df =ð2pÞ ¼ 1 MHz.
We then apply a weak microwave probe at var-
ious detunings Dmw (Fig. 4A) and observe when
particles are created or annihilated to probe the
excitation spectrum of the many-body ground
state. Figure 4, B and C, shows the three expected
and measured transitions: (i) A particle is added
at zero energy at the edge, and we reach a seven-
particle ground state; (ii) particles are added
to the bulk, which requires at least the bulk
gap in energy; (iii) particles are removed from
the bulk, which appears as a dip at negative
detuning.
Probing the protecting symmetry
We now probe the robustness of the fourfold
ground state degeneracy to small perturbations
that respect the protecting symmetry repre-
sented by S B. To do so, we distort the chain on
one side by moving the rightmost site out of
the sublattice B (Fig. 5A). Because the edge site
and its second neighbor are no longer at the
“magic angle,” this creates a coupling J″=h ≃
0:26 MHz between them. This perturbation
breaks the chiral symmetry protecting the
fermionic SSH model and correspondingly
leads to a splitting of the single-particle edge
modes. However, such a perturbation commutes
with S B and therefore should not break the
many-body ground state degeneracy. To check
these expectations, we first repeat the spectro-
scopic measurement in the single-particle regime
(applying the microwave probe on an empty
chain, as shown in Fig. 2A), and observe a split-
ting of the edge modes (Fig. 5B). By contrast, the
spectroscopic measurement for the bosonic many-
body ground state (applying the probe after the
adiabatic preparation reaching half-filling of the
bulk, as done in Fig. 4) indeed reveals a quasi-
degenerate ground state (Fig. 5C). The small
remaining shift of 0.03(2) MHz is explained in
(35) by using simulations that include van der
Waals interactions. We also checked that when
we prepare the ground state with a half-filled
bulk, i.e., whenever Df lies in the region jℏDf j <
jJj  jJ′j, the spectroscopic measurement reveals
a symmetry-protected ground state degeneracy.
de Léséleuc et al., Science 365, 775–780 (2019) 23 August 2019
The above experiment illustrates that, in con-
trast to a noninteracting SPT phase, the robust-
ness of the bosonic many-body ground state at
half-filling cannot be understood at the single-
particle level. To gain an intuition for the dif-
ferences between the SPT phase of noninteracting
fermions and of hard-core bosons, we use the
following simple picture. Considering only the
three rightmost sites (the edge and a dimer),
and taking the perturbative limit (J ≫ J′; J″), we
first obtain the energy of having no particle on
the edge site and one delocalized on the dimer:
J  ðJ′ þ J″Þ2 =ð2JÞ (the second term is an en-
ergy correction stemming from virtual hopping
of the particle from the bulk to the edge). By
contrast, when there is one particle on the dimer
and one on the edge, we obtain J  ðJ′T J″Þ2 =
ð2JÞ with an energy correction now depending
on the particle quantum statistics (þ sign for
bosons,  for fermions, because of commutation
rules). More details can be found in section 3.3
of (35). This simplified model captures why the
fermionic degeneracy is broken by the J″ term,
which is not the case for hard-core bosons.
Discussion and outlook
We prepared quantum many-body states in two
topologically different phases and observed
four signatures of an SPT phase for interacting
bosons: (i) a ground state degeneracy charac-
terized by zero-energy edge states, (ii) an exci-
tation gap in the bulk, (iii) a nonvanishing string
order, and (iv) a robustness of these properties
against perturbations respecting the protecting
symmetry S B .
The symmetry protecting our SPT phase de-
fines the symmetry group U ð1Þ  ℤT2 , which can
also protect the Haldane phase of an antiferro-
magnetic spin-1 chain (25). We show numerically
in (35) that our quantum many-body ground
state is in the same SPT phase as the Haldane
state, as they can be smoothly connected by
adding hopping terms with complex amplitudes
as well as additional Ising-type interactions
Vij º Zi Zj , both terms respecting S B .
Our work demonstrates that Rydberg plat-
forms, which combine flexible geometries and
a natural access to the strongly correlated re-
gime via the hard-core constraint, can explore
unconventional quantum many-body states
of matter. In combination with schemes for ob-
taining topological band structures in higher
dimensions (44), it opens the prospect for the
realization of long-range entangled states such
as fractional Chern insulators with anyonic
excitations.
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R ES E A RC H | R E S EA R C H A R T I C LE
45. S. de Léséleuc, Replication data and theory code for:
Experimental realization of a symmetry protected topological
phase of interacting bosons with Rydberg atoms. Zenodo
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ACKN OW LEDG MEN TS
Funding: This project has received funding from the European
Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under
grant agreement no. 817842 (PASQuanS), from “Investissements
d’Avenir” LabEx PALM (ANR-10-LABX-0039-PALM, projects
de Léséleuc et al., Science 365, 775–780 (2019) 23 August 2019
QUANTICA and XYLOS) and from the IXCORE-Fondation pour la SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIALS
Recherche. H.P.B. is supported by the European Union under the science.sciencemag.org/content/365/6455/775/suppl/DC1
ERC consolidator grant SIRPOL (grant no. 681208). Author Supplementary Text
contributions: S.d.L., V.L., P.S., and D.B. carried out the experimental Figs. S1 to S8
measurements and data analysis; S.W. and N.L. performed the Table S1
theoretical analysis. All work was supervised by H.P.B., T.L., and References (46–71)
A.B. All authors contributed to the writing of the manuscript.
Competing interests: The authors declare no competing interests. 31 October 2018; accepted 18 July 2019
Data and materials availability: The experimental data and theory Published online 1 August 2019
code of this study are available at (45). 10.1126/science.aav9105
Downloaded from https://www.science.org on February 27, 2024
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