Floquet engineering of an optical solenoid to probe Chern insulators

The idea of inserting a local magnetic flux, representing the field of a thin solenoid, plays an important role in various condensed matter models, especially in the understanding of topological systems. One example is the creation and manipulation of quasiparticle or hole excitations in these systems, which are essential for fault-tolerant quantum information processing. Implementing such local fluxes in cold atom experiments promises great potential. Here, we propose an experimental scheme to realize a local flux in a cold atom setting which takes advantage of the recent developments in synthetic gauge fields and quantum microscopes. To demonstrate the feasibility of our method, we consider quantum-Hall-type lattice systems and study the dynamical creation of topological excitations. We analyze the adiabatic charge pumping by tuning the strength of the local flux.