UC Berkeley

A quantum system's energy landscape may have points where multiple energy surfaces are degenerate and that exhibit singular geometry of the wave function manifold, with major consequences for the system's properties. Ultracold atoms in optical lattices have been used to indirectly characterize such points in the band structure. We measured the non-Abelian transformation produced by transport directly through the singularities. We accelerated atoms along a quasi-momentum trajectory that enters, turns, and then exits the singularities at linear and quadratic band-touching points of a honeycomb lattice. Measurements after transport identified the topological winding numbers of these singularities to be 1 and 2, respectively. Our work introduces a distinct method for probing singularities that enables the study of non-Dirac singularities in ultracold-atom quantum simulators.