Exploring the many-body localization transition in two dimensions
By Jae-yoon Choi, S. Hild, J. Zeiher, P. Schauss, Antonio Rubio-Abadal, T. Yefsah, V. Khemani, D. Huse, I. Bloch, C. Gross. Science, 2016
892 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Bosons refusing to thermalize in 2D Messy, interacting quantum-mechanical systems are difficult to analyze theoretically. In a single spatial dimension, the calculations are still tractable, and experiments have recently confirmed the prediction that sufficiently strong disorder can disrupt the transport of interacting particles. In two dimensions, however, the theoretical blueprint is missing. Choi et al. used single-site imaging of cold 87Rb atoms in an optical lattice to show that similar localization occurs in two-dimensional (2D) systems. The study highlights the power of quantum simulation to solve problems that are currently inaccessible to classical computing techniques. Science, this issue p. 1547 Single-site imaging in a two-dimensional optical lattice filled with interacting rubidium atoms shows that disorder can prevent thermalization. A fundamental assumption in statistical physics is that generic closed quantum many-body systems thermalize under their own dynamics. Recently, the emergence of many-body localized systems has questioned this concept and challenged our understanding of the connection between statistical physics and quantum mechanics. Here we report on the observation of a many-body localization transition between thermal and localized phases for bosons in a two-dimensional disordered optical lattice. With our single-site–resolved measurements, we track the relaxation dynamics of an initially prepared out-of-equilibrium density pattern and find strong evidence for a diverging length scale when approaching the localization transition. Our experiments represent a demonstration and in-depth characterization of many-body localization in a regime not accessible with state-of-the-art simulations on classical computers.
Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e2145b07938b1b62c282dcb97dfeb2b1aff5934b
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In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics
Citations in the corpus
- Random Quantum Circuits (2022, background): “We focus here on experiments with quantum circuits, but note that these works follow many milestone papers probing fundamental aspects of quantum dynamics, thermalization and many-body localization on a wide variety of analog simulator platforms (282, 35, 285, 286, 287, 288, 289, 290).”
- Many-body localization and delocalization in large quantum chains (2018, background): “Experimentally, MBL has been reported in ultracold atoms [13, 14], trapped ions [15], and dipolar spins in diamond [16].”
- Colloquium : Many-body localization, thermalization, and entanglement (2018, background): “However, first experiments in a system of twodimensional interacting bosons exposed to a twodimensional disorder pattern seem to also indicate the presence of a localized phase that is reached above a critical disorder strength (Choi et al., 2016).”
- Ergodicity breaking transition in finite disordered spin chains (2020, methodology): “MBL and the corresponding transition were widely studied by means of numerical approaches [35, 45–73] and phenomenological theories [74–85], as well as experimentally [86–92].”
- Practical quantum advantage in quantum simulation (2022, background): “…of addressing existing questions is being able to directly investigate the interplay between disorder and interaction in two-dimensional systems 29,82 , especially in determining the transition between localized and delocalized particles by observing expansion dynamics of particles on a…”
- Pre-thermal phases of matter protected by time-translation symmetry (2016, background): “[96] Jae-yoon Choi, Sebastian Hild, Johannes Zeiher, Peter Schauß, Antonio Rubio-Abadal, Tarik Yefsah, Vedika Khemani, David A.”
- Probing Slow Relaxation and Many-Body Localization in Two-Dimensional Quasiperiodic Systems (2017, background): “At the same time, initial experiments provided evidence for a MBL phase in higher dimensions by measuring global transport [16,17].”
- Signatures of integrability in the dynamics of Rydberg-blockaded chains (2018, background): “[8] Jae-yoon Choi, Sebastian Hild, Johannes Zeiher, Peter Schauß, Antonio Rubio-Abadal, Tarik Yefsah, Vedika Khemani, David A.”