Transport of Hubbard-Band Quasiparticles in Disordered Optical Lattices

Abstract

Quantum degenerate gases trapped in optical lattices are ideal testbeds for fundamental physics because these systems are tunable, well characterized, and isolated from the environment. Controlled disorder can be introduced to explore suppression of quantum diffusion in the absence of conventional dephasing mechanisms such as phonons, which are unavoidable in experiments on electronic solids. Recent experiments use transport of degenerate Fermi gases in optical lattices (Kondov et al. Phys. Rev. Lett. 114, 083002 (2015)) to probe a particularly extreme regime of strong interaction in what can be modeled as an Anderson-Hubbard model. These experiments find evidence for an intriguing insulating phase where quantum diffusion is completely suppressed by strong disorder. Quantitative interpretation of these experiments remains an open problem that requires inclusion of non-zero entropy, strong interaction, and trapping. We argue that the suppression of transport can be thought of as localization of Hubbard-band quasiparticles. We construct a theory of transport of Hubbard-band quasiparticles tailored to trapped optical lattice experiments. We compare the theory directly with center-of-mass transport experiments of Kondov et al. with no fitting parameters. The close agreement between theory and experiments shows that the suppression of transport is only partly due to finite entropy effects. We argue that the complete suppression of transport is consistent with Anderson localization of Hubbard-band quasiparticles. The combination of our theoretical framework and optical lattice experiments offers an important platform for studying localization in isolated many-body quantum systems.

13 pages, 9 figures

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Cited by in corpus (7)

• Equilibration Dynamics of Strongly Interacting Bosons in 2D Lattices with Disorder
• Dynamics of Disordered States in the Bose-Hubbard Model with Confinement
• Anderson localization in optical lattices with correlated disorder
• Propagation of collective pair excitations in disordered Bose superfluids
• Localization of weakly interacting bosons in two dimensions: disorder vs lattice geometry effects
• The impact of speckle disorder on a superfluid Fermi system
• Cooling Quantum Gases with Entropy Localization