Absence of disordered Thouless pumps at finite frequency

Abstract: A Thouless pump is a slowly driven one-dimensional band insulator which pumps charge at a quantised rate. Previous work showed that pumping persists in weakly disordered chains, and separately in clean chains at finite drive frequency. We study the interplay of disorder and finite frequency, and show that the pump rate always decays to zero due to non-adiabatic transitions between the instantaneous eigenstates. However, the decay is slow, occurring on a time-scale that is exponentially large in the period of the drive. In the adiabatic limit, the band gap in the instantaneous spectrum closes at a critical disorder strength above which pumping ceases. We predict the scaling of the pump rate around this transition from a model of scattering between rare states near the band edges. Our predictions can be experimentally tested in ultracold atomic and photonic platforms.