Thermally assisted Thouless pumping in the Rice-Mele model

We investigate the effect of dissipation from a thermal environment on topological pumping in the Rice-Mele model. We report that dissipation can improve the robustness of pumping quantization in a regime of finite driving frequencies. Specifically, in this regime, a low-temperature dissipative dynamics can lead to a pumped charge much nearer to the Thouless quantized value with respect to the coherent-evolution case. We can understand this effect in the Floquet framework: the pumped charge is nearer to the Thouless value because the dissipation increases the population of the so-called lowest-energy Floquet band, where the pumping is essentially quantized. This finding is a step in the understanding of a potentially very useful resource to exploit in experimental applications, where dissipation effects are unavoidable.