Simulation and detection of the topological properties of a modulated Rice-Mele model in a one-dimensional circuit-QED lattice

Here, we propose a simple scheme to realize a one-dimensional (1D) modulated Rice-Mele model (RMM) and investigate its topological properties with a 1D circuit quantum electrodynamics (QED) lattice. The system can be mapped into a Chern insulator model by introducing a period parameter. Interestingly and surprisingly, we found that the circuit-QED lattice system always exhibits topologically nontrivial phases if both the nearest-neighbor hopping strength between two resonators and the qubit-assisted on-site potentials are alternately changed in the direction of the lattice. The numerical results show that the topological phases can be obtained by introducing an additional modulation parameter and both the edge state and topological invariant can be unambiguously seen with the existence of decay and disorders, even with few resonators in the lattice.