Three-dimensional strong localization of matter waves by scattering from atoms in a lattice with a confinement-induced resonance

Abstract

The possibility of using ultracold atoms to observe strong localization of matter waves is now the subject of a great interest, as undesirable decoherence and interactions can be made negligible in these systems. It was proposed that a static disordered potential can be realized by trapping atoms of a given species in randomly chosen sites of a deep 3D optical lattice with no multiple occupation. We analyze in detail the prospects of this scheme for observing localized states in 3D for a matter wave of a different atomic species that interacts with the trapped particles and that is sufficiently far detuned from the optical lattice to be insensitive to it. We demonstrate that at low energy a large number of 3D strongly localized states can be produced for the matter wave, if the effective scattering length describing the interaction of the matter wave with a trapped atom is of the order of the mean distance between the trapped particles. Such high values of the effective scattering length can be obtained by using a Feshbach resonance to adjust the free space inter-species scattering length and by taking advantage of confinement-induced resonances induced by the trapping of the scatterers in the lattice.

21 pages; 14 figures

References in corpus (6)

• Observation of the Pairing Gap in a Strongly Interacting Fermi Gas
• Crossover from a molecular Bose-Einstein condensate to a degenerate Fermi gas
• Localization of bosonic atoms by fermionic impurities in a 3d optical lattice
• Molecules of Fermionic Atoms in an Optical Lattice
• Localization of Matter Waves in 2D-Disordered Optical Potentials
• Confinement-induced resonances for a two-component ultracold atom gas in arbitrary quasi-one-dimensional traps

Cited by in corpus (6)

• Universal Fermi gases in mixed dimensions
• Superfluidity versus Anderson localization in a dilute Bose gas
• Disorder-induced trapping versus Anderson localization in Bose-Einstein condensates expanding in disordered potentials
• Disorder versus the Mermin-Wagner-Hohenberg effect: From classical spin systems to ultracold atomic gases
• Induced p-wave superfluidity in two dimensions: Brane world in cold atoms and nonrelativistic defect CFTs
• Analysis of Localization Phenomena in Weakly Interacting Disordered Lattice Gases