Abstract

Topological states of matter have been an active field of research in physics for many years. The recent experimental progress on their realization with synthetic materials such as ultracold atomic gases in optical lattices and photonic systems raises natural questions about the notion of topological quantum matter far from thermal equilibrium. In this talk, we present our theoretical findings in this context. First, an experimentally feasible scheme to dynamically prepare topological states in a target system by means of adiabatic evolution in an extended system will be discussed. The second part focuses on the quench dynamics of interacting topological insulators. Specifically, we discuss the non-equilibrium Hall response of a system initialized in a topologically trivial state before its Hamiltonian is ramped into a Chern insulator phase, comparing the free coherent dynamics with effects of dephasing and interaction induced dissipation, respectively.