Emergence of integer quantum Hall effect from chaos

We present an analytic microscopic theory showing that in a large class of spin-1/2 quasiperiodic quantum kicked rotors, a dynamical analog of the integer quantum Hall effect (IQHE) emerges from an intrinsic chaotic structure. Specifically, the inverse of the Planck's quantum (he) and the rotor's energy growth rate mimic the filling fraction and the longitudinal conductivity in conventional IQHE, respectively, and a hidden quantum number is found to mimic the quantized Hall conductivity. We show that for an infinite discrete set of critical values of he, the long-time energy growth rate is universal and of order of unity (metallic phase), but otherwise vanishes (insulating phase). Moreover, the rotor insulating phases are topological, each of which is characterized by a hidden quantum number. This number exhibits universal behavior for small he, i.e., it jumps by unity whenever he decreases, passing through each critical value. This intriguing phenomenon is not triggered by the likes of Landau band filling, well known to be the mechanism for conventional IQHE, and far beyond the canonical Thouless-Kohmoto-Nightingale-Nijs paradigm for quantum Hall transitions. Instead, this dynamical phenomenon is of strong chaos origin; it does not occur when the dynamics is (partially) regular. More precisely, we find that a topological object, similar to the topological theta angle in quantum chromodynamics, emerges from strongly chaotic motion at microscopic scales, and its renormalization gives the hidden quantum number. Our analytic results are confirmed by numerical simulations. Our findings indicate that rich topological quantum phenomena can emerge from chaos and might point to a new direction of study in the interdisciplinary area straddling chaotic dynamics and condensed matter physics. This work is a substantial extension of a short paper published earlier by two of us [Y. Chen and C. Tian, Phys. Rev. Lett. 113, 216802 (2014)].