Energy-space random walk in a driven disordered Bose gas

Abstract

Motivated by the experimental observation [1] that driving a non-interacting Bose gas in a 3D box with weak disorder leads to power-law energy growth, $E\propto t^{\eta }$ with $\eta =0.46(2)$, and compressed-exponential momentum distributions that show dynamic scaling, we perform systematic numerical and analytical studies of this system. Schrödinger-equation simulations reveal a crossover from $\eta \approx 0.5$ to $\eta \approx 0.4$ with increasing disorder strength, hinting at the existence of two different dynamical regimes. We present a semi-classical model that captures the simulation results and allows an understanding of the dynamics in terms of an energy-space random walk, from which a crossover from $E\propto t^{1/2}$ to $E\propto t^{2/5}$ scaling is analytically obtained. The two limits correspond to the random walk being limited by the rate of the elastic disorder-induced scattering or the rate at which the drive can change the system's energy. Our results provide the theoretical foundation for further experiments.

Main text (7 pages, 6 figures), Appendices (7 pages, 1 figure)