The experimental realization of lattices with Chern bands in ultracold-atom and photonic systems has motivated the study of time-dependent phenomena, such as spatial propagation, in lattices with nontrivial topology. We study the dynamics of Gaussian wave packets on the Haldane honeycomb Chern-band lattice model, in the presence of a harmonic trap. We focus on the transverse response to a force, which is due partly to the Berry curvature and partly to the transverse component of the energy band curvature. We evaluate the accuracy of a semiclassical description, which treats the wave packet as a point particle in both real and momentum space, in reproducing the motion of a realistic wave packet with finite extent. We find that, in order to accurately capture the wave-packet dynamics, the extent of the wave packet in momentum space needs to be taken into account: The dynamics is sensitive to the interplay of band dispersion and Berry curvature over the finite region of momentum (reciprocal) space where the wave packet has support. Moreover, if the wave packet is prepared with a finite initial momentum, the semiclassical analysis reproduces its motion as long as it has a large overlap with the eigenstates of a single band. The semiclassical description generally improves with increasing real-space size of the wave packet, as long as the external conditions (e.g., external force) remain uniform throughout the spatial extent of the wave packet.

• Received 30 September 2015

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevA.92.063626