Probing Slow Relaxation and Many-Body Localization in Two-Dimensional Quasiperiodic Systems

By P. Bordia, H. Luschen, S. Scherg, S. Gopalakrishnan, Michael Jason Knap, U. Schneider, I. Bloch. 2017

250 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In a many-body localized (MBL) quantum system, the ergodic hypothesis breaks down, giving rise to a fundamentally new many-body phase. Whether and under which conditions MBL can occur in higher dimensions remains an outstanding challenge both for experiments and theory. Here, we experimentally explore the relaxation dynamics of an interacting gas of fermionic potassium atoms loaded in a two-dimensional optical lattice with different quasiperiodic potentials along the two directions. We observe a dramatic slowing down of the relaxation for intermediate disorder strengths. Furthermore, beyond a critical disorder strength, we see negligible relaxation on experimentally accessible time scales, indicating a possible transition into a two-dimensional MBL phase. Our experiments reveal a distinct interplay of interactions, disorder, and dimensionality and provide insights into regimes where controlled theoretical approaches are scarce.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a871af08b41b4859cdfb1ea7395e46c02e5dbf05

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In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

1. A. Mirlin
2. Adam Smith
3. D. Polyakov
4. Frank Pollmann
5. J. Knolle
6. Myungshik S. Kim
7. F. Schindler
8. K. Tikhonov

Citations in the corpus

• Many-body localization and delocalization in large quantum chains (2018, background): “In this context, it is interesting to note that a similar slow transport near the transition (or, more accurately, apparent transition) is also found for quasiperiodic systems [13] as well as in two-dimensional disordered systems [75], where the influence of rare bottlenecks is expected to be neglig”
• Simulating quantum many-body dynamics on a current digital quantum computer (2019, methodology): “de with optical lattices [30–36] where the natural evolution of the atoms corresponds to a high accuracy to that of a local Hamiltonian of choice.”