We compute the absorption spectrum of strongly repulsive one-dimensional bosons in a disordered or quasi-periodic optical lattice. At commensurate filling, the particle-hole resonances of the Mott insulator are broadened as the disorder strength is increased. In the non-commensurate case, mapping the problem to the Anderson model allows us to study the Bose-glass phase. Surprisingly we find that a perturbative treatment in both cases, weak and strong disorder, gives a good description at all frequencies. In particular we find that the infrared absorption rate in the thermodynamic limit is quadratic in frequency. This result is unexpected, since for other quantities like the conductivity in one dimensional systems, perturbation theory is only applicable at high frequencies. We discuss applications to recent experiments on optical lattice systems, and in particular the effect of the harmonic trap.
The extended Bose-Hubbard model subjected to a disordered potential is predicted to display a rich phase diagram. In the case of uniform random disorder one finds two insulating quantum phases -- the Mott-insulator and the Haldane insulator -- in addition to a superfluid and a Bose glass phase. In the case of a quasiperiodic potential further phases are found, eg the incommensurate density wave, adiabatically connected to the Haldane insulator. For the case of weak random disorder we determine the phase boundaries using a perturbative bosonization approach. We then calculate the entanglement s…
We show that tunneling and localization properties of interacting ultracold atoms in an optical lattice can be controlled by adiabatically turning on a fast oscillatory force even in the presence of disorder. Our calculations are based on the exact solution of the time-dependent Schroedinger equation, using the Floquet formalism. Implications of our findings for larger systems and the possibility of controlling the phase diagram of disordered-interacting bosonic systems are discussed.
We study the coherence and density modulation of a non-equilibrium exciton-polariton condensate in a one-dimensional valley with disorder. By means of interferometric measurements we evidence a modulation of the first-order coherence function and we relate it to a disorder-induced modulation of the condensate density, that increases as the pump power is increased. The non-monotonous spatial coherence function is found to be the result of the strong non-equilibrium character of the one-dimensional system, in the presence of disorder.
In this paper we present a theoretical investigation of the effect of a superlattice potential on some properties of non-interacting bosons in one dimensional lattices with Aubry-Andŕe disorder potential. In the first part, we investigate the single particle localization properties. We find a re-entrant localization-delocalization transition and the development of multiple mobility edges for a range of superlattice potential strengths. In the second part, we study the Bose-Einstein condensation with an additional harmonic trapping potential. We find that an increase in the superlattice potenti…
Using the exact Bose-Fermi mapping, we study universal properties of ground-state density distributions and finite-temperature quantum critical behavior of one-dimensional hard-core bosons in trapped incommensurate optical lattices. Through the analysis of universal scaling relations in the quantum critical regime, we demonstrate that the superfluid to Bose glass transition and the general phase diagram of disordered hard-core bosons can be uniquely determined from finite-temperature density distributions of the trapped disordered system.
Heating induced by an oscillating modulation of the interaction strength in an atomic Fermion pair condensate is analyzed. The coupled fermion-boson model, generalized by incorporating a time-dependent intermode coupling through a magnetic Feshbach resonance, is applied. The dynamics is analytically characterized in a perturbative scheme. The results account for experimental findings which have uncovered a damped and delayed response of the condensate to the modulation. The delay is due to the variation of the quasiparticle energies and the subsequent relaxation of the condensate. The detected…
By means of a temporal-periodic modulation of the s-wave scattering length, a procedure to control the evolution of an initial atomic coherent state associated with a Bosonic Josephson junction is presented. The scheme developed has a remarkable advantage of avoiding the quantum collapse of the state due to phase and number diffusion. This kind of control could prove useful for atom interferometry using BECs, where the interactions limit the evolution time stage within the interferometer, and where the modulation can be induced via magnetic Feshbach resonances as recently experimentally demons…
We employ ultracold atoms with controllable disorder and interaction to study the paradigmatic problem of disordered bosons in the full disorder-interaction plane. Combining measurements of coherence, transport and excitation spectra, we get evidence of an insulating regime extending from weak to strong interaction and surrounding a superfluid-like regime, in general agreement with the theory. For strong interaction, we reveal the presence of a strongly-correlated Bose glass coexisting with a Mott insulator.
We study a one-dimensional disordered quantum fluid with linearly confining interactions (disordered Schwinger model) using bosonization and the nonperturbative functional renormalization group. We find that the long-range interactions make the Anderson insulator (or, for bosons, the Bose-glass) fixed point (corresponding to a compressible state with a gapless optical conductivity) unstable, even if the latter may control the flow at intermediate energy scales. The stable fixed point describes an incompressible ground state with a gapped optical conductivity similar to a Mott insulator. These …
We investigate the low-temperature properties of a ultracold gas made of bosonic alkali-metal atoms with finite-range interaction under the effect of a disordered environment. The statistical characterization of the disorder is investigated within an effective-field-theory formalism for a generic spatial dimension $d$. Moving to $d=3$, where all the arising divergences are properly regularized, we focus on the depletion of both the condensate and superfluid densities. At zero temperature we obtain meaningful analytical formulas for the condensate fraction and the superfluid fraction which take…
Disorder is everywhere in nature and it has a fundamental impact on the behavior of many quantum systems. The presence of a small amount of disorder, in fact, can dramatically change the coherence and transport properties of a system. Despite the growing interest in this topic, a complete understanding of the issue is still missing. An open question, for example, is the description of the interplay of disorder and interactions, which has been predicted to give rise to exotic states of matter such as quantum glasses or many-body localization. In this review, we will present an overview of exper…
Spectral excitations of ultracold gases of bosonic atoms trapped in one dimensional optical lattices with disorder are investigated by means of the variational cluster approach applied to the Bose-Hubbard model. In particular, qualitatively different disorder distributions typically employed in experiments are considered. The computed spectra exhibit a strong dependence on both the shape of the disorder distribution and the disorder strength. We compare alternative results for the Mott gap obtained from its formal definition and from the minimum peak distance, which is the quantity available f…
It is commonly accepted that there are no phase transitions in one-dimensional (1D) systems at a finite temperature, because long-range correlations are destroyed by thermal fluctuations. Here we demonstrate that the 1D gas of short-range interacting bosons in the presence of disorder can undergo a finite temperature phase transition between two distinct states: fluid and insulator. None of these states has long-range spatial correlations, but this is a true albeit non-conventional phase transition because transport properties are singular at the transition point. In the fluid phase the mass t…
We study the dynamics of a nonlinear one-dimensional disordered system obtained by coupling the Anderson model with the Gross-Pitaevskii equation. An analytical model provides us with a single quantity globally characterizing the localization of the system. This quantity obeys a scaling law with respect to the width of the initial state, which can be used to characterize the dynamics independently of the initial state.
Interacting bosons generically form a superfluid state. In the presence of disorder it can get converted into a compressible Bose glass state. Here we study such transition in one dimension at moderate interaction using bosonization and renormalization group techniques. We derive the two-loop scaling equations and discuss the phase diagram. We find that the correlation functions at the transition are characterized by universal exponents in a finite region around the fixed point.
We study the coherence of a disordered and interacting quantum light field after propagation along a nonlinear optical fiber. Disorder is generated by a cross-phase modulation with a randomized auxiliary classical light field, while interactions are induced by self-phase modulation. When penetrating the fiber from free space, the incoming quantum light undergoes a disorder and interaction quench. By calculating the coherence function of the transmitted quantum light, we show that the decoherence induced by the quench spreads in a light-cone fashion in the nonequilibrium many-body quantum syste…
We extend the self-energy functional theory (SFT) to the case of interacting lattice bosons in the presence of symmetry breaking and quenched disorder. The self-energy functional we derive depends only on the self-energies of the disorder-averaged propagators, allowing for the construction of general non-perturbative approximations. Using a simple single-site reference system with only three variational parameters, we are able to reproduce numerically exact quantum Monte Carlo (QMC) results on local observables of the Bose-Hubbard model with box disorder with high accuracy. At strong interacti…
We investigate, both experimentally and theoretically, the static geometric properties of a harmonically trapped Bose-Einstein condensate of ${}^6$Li$_2$ molecules in laser speckle potentials. Experimentally, we measure the in-situ column density profiles and the corresponding transverse cloud widths over many laser speckle realizations. We compare the measured widths with a theory that is non-perturbative with respect to the disorder and includes quantum fluctuations. Importantly, for small disorder strengths we find quantitative agreement with the perturbative approach of Huang and Meng, whi…
We present a theoretical study of the effects of the next-nearest-neighbor (NNN) hopping ($t_2$) on the properties of non-interacting bosons in optical lattices in the presence of an Aubry-André quasi-disorder. First we investigate, employing exact diagonalization, the effects of $t_2$ on the localization properties of a single boson. The localization is monitored using an entanglement measure as well as with inverse participation ratio. We find that the sign of $t_2$ has a significant influence on the localization effects. We also provide analytical results in support of the trends found in t…
We analyze the effects of disorder and quasi-disorder on the ground-state properties of ultra-cold polar bosons in optical lattices. We show that the interplay between disorder and inter-site interactions leads to rich phase diagrams. A uniform disorder leads to a Haldane-insulator phase with finite parity order, whereas the density-wave phase becomes a Bose-glass at very weak disorder. For quasi-disorder, the Haldane insulator connects with a gapped generalized incommesurate density wave without an intermediate critical region.
We study the interplay between disorder, interactions and decoherence induced by spontaneous emission process. Interactions are included in the Anderson model via a mean-field approximation, and a simple model for spontaneous emission is introduced. Numerical simulations allow us to study the effects of decoherence on different dynamical regimes. Physical pictures for the mechanisms at play are discussed and provide simple interpretations. Finally, we discuss the validity of scaling laws on the initial state width.
Clarifying the interplay of interactions and disorder is fundamental to the understanding of many quantum systems, including superfluid helium in porous media, granular and thin-film superconductors, and light propagating in disordered media. One central aspect for bosonic systems is the competition between disorder, which tends to localize particles, and weak repulsive interactions, which instead have a delocalizing effect. Since the required degree of independent control of the disorder and of the interactions is not easily achievable in most available physical systems, a systematic experime…
We derive an effective quantum Josephson array model for a weakly interacting one-dimensional condensate that is fragmented into weakly coupled puddles by a disorder potential. The distribution of coupling constants, obtained from first principles, indicate that weakly interacting bosons in a disorder potential undergo a superfluid insulator transition controlled by a strong randomness fixed point [Phys. Rev. Lett. 93, 150402 (2004)]. We compute renormalization group flows for concrete realizations of the disorder potential to facilitate finite size scaling of experimental results and allow co…
We study the tail of the spectrum for non-interacting bosons in a blue-detuned random speckle potential. Using an instanton approach we derive the asymptotic behavior of the density of states in d dimensions. The leading corrections resulting from fluctuations around the saddle point solution are obtained by means of the Gel'fand-Yaglom method generalized to functional determinants with zero modes. We find a good agreement with the results of numerical simulations in one dimension. The effect of weak repulsive interactions in the Lifshitz tail is also discussed.
We consider interacting bosons in a 2D square and a 3D cubic optical lattice with a periodic modulation of the s-wave scattering length. At first we map the underlying periodically driven Bose-Hubbard model for large enough driving frequencies approximately to an effective time-independent Hamiltonian with a conditional hopping. Combining different analytical approaches with quantum Monte Carlo simulations then reveals that the superfluid-Mott insulator quantum phase transition still exists despite the periodic driving and that the location of the quantum phase boundary turns out to depend qui…
One of the most important issues in disordered systems is the interplay of the disorder and repulsive interactions. Several recent experimental advances on this topic have been made with ultracold atoms, in particular the observation of Anderson localization, and the realization of the disordered Bose-Hubbard model. There are however still questions as to how to differentiate the complex insulating phases resulting from this interplay, and how to measure the size of the superfluid fragments that these phases entail. It has been suggested that the correlation function of such a system can give …
We study phase transitions in a two dimensional weakly interacting Bose gas in a random potential at finite temperatures. We identify superfluid, normal fluid, and insulator phases and construct the phase diagram. At T=0 one has a tricritical point where the three phases coexist. The truncation of the energy distribution at the trap barrier, which is a generic phenomenon in cold atom systems, limits the growth of the localization length and in contrast to the thermodynamic limit the insulator phase is present at any temperature.
We investigate the superfluid-insulator quantum phase transition of one-dimensional bosons with off-diagonal disorder by means of large-scale Monte-Carlo simulations. For weak disorder, we find the transition to be in the same universality class as the superfluid-Mott insulator transition of the clean system. The nature of the transition changes for stronger disorder. Beyond a critical disorder strength, we find nonuniversal, disorder-dependent critical behavior. We compare our results to recent perturbative and strong-disorder renormalization group predictions. We also discuss experimental im…
Disorder modifies the sound-wave excitation spectrum of Bose-Einstein condensates. We consider the classical hydrodynamic limit, where the disorder correlation length is much longer than the condensate healing length. By perturbation theory, we compute the phonon lifetime and correction to the speed of sound. This correction is found to be negative in all dimensions, with universal asymptotics for smooth correlations. Considering in detail optical speckle potentials, we find a quite rich intermediate structure. This has consequences for the average density of states, particularly in one dimens…
The question of how the low-energy properties of disordered quantum systems may be connected to exotic localization phenomena at high energy is a key open question in the context of quantum glasses and many-body localization. In arXiv:2105.05774 we have shown that key features of the excitation spectrum of a disordered system can be efficiently probed from out-of-equilibrium dynamics following a quantum quench, providing distinctive signatures of the various phases. Here, we extend this work by providing a more in-depth study of the behavior of the quench spectral functions associated to diffe…
We investigate the response to superlattice modulation of a bosonic quantum gas confined to arrays of tubes emulating the one-dimensional Bose-Hubbard model. We demonstrate, using both time-dependent density matrix renormalization group and linear response theory, that such a superlattice modulation gives access to the excitation spectrum of the Bose-Hubbard model at finite momenta. Deep in the Mott-insulator, the response is characterized by a narrow energy absorption peak at a frequency approximately corresponding to the onsite interaction strength between bosons. This spectroscopic techniqu…
We show that in the regime when strong disorder is more relevant than field quantization the superfluid--to--Bose-glass criticality of one-dimensional bosons is preceded by the prolonged logarithmically slow classical-field renormalization flow of the superfluid stiffness at mesoscopic scales. With the system compressibility remaining constant, the quantum nature of the system manifests itself only in the renormalization of dilute weak links. On the insulating side, the flow ultimately reaches a value of the Luttinger parameter at which the instanton--anti-instanton pairs start to proliferate,…
We show that a lattice of phase oscillators with random natural frequencies, described by a generalization of the nearest-neighbor Kuramoto model with an additional cosine coupling term, undergoes a phase transition from a desynchronized to a synchronized state. This model may be derived from the complex Ginzburg-Landau equations describing a disordered lattice of driven-dissipative Bose-Einstein condensates of exciton polaritons. We derive phase diagrams that classify the desynchronized and synchronized states that exist in both one and two dimensions. This is achieved by outlining the connec…
In this paper, we study non-interacting bosons in a disordered one-dimensional optical lattice in a harmonic potential. We consider the case of deterministic disorder produced by an Aubry-André potential. Using exact diagonalization, we investigate both the zero temperature and the finite temperature properties. We investigate the localization properties by using an entanglement measure. We find that the extreme sensitivity of the localization properties to the number of lattice sites in finite size closed chains disappear in open chains. This feature continues to be present in the presence of…
We study the equilibrium and non-equilibrium properties of strongly interacting bosons on a lattice in presence of a random bounded disorder potential. Using a Gutzwiller projected variational technique, we study the equilibrium phase diagram of the disordered Bose Hubbard model and obtain the Mott insulator, Bose glass and superfluid phases. We also study the non equilibrium response of the system under a periodic temporal drive where, starting from the superfluid phase, the hopping parameter is ramped down linearly in time, and back to its initial value. We study the density of excitations c…
Motivated by a recent experiment, we study the dynamics of bosons in a disordered optical lattice, interacting with a variably sized bath of disorder free atoms. As the number of particles in the bath is increased, there is a transition between "localized" and "ergodic" behavior, which are characterized by the long-time behavior of an initial density wave. We model the dynamics with a stochastic mean field theory, reproducing the central observations of the experiment. A key conclusion from our study is that particle loss plays an important role.
We consider a gas of bosons in a bichromatic optical lattice at finite temperatures. As the amplitude of the secondary lattice grows, the single-particles eigenstates become localized. We calculate the canonical partition function using exact methods for the noninteracting and strongly interacting limit and analyze the statistical properties of the superfluid phase, localized phase and the strongly interacting gas. We show that those phases may be distinguished in experiment using off-resonant light scattering.
We develop an inhomogeneous quantum mean-field approach to the behavior of collective excitations across the superfluid-Mott glass quantum phase transition in two dimensions, complementing recent quantum Monte Carlo simulations [Phys. Rev. Lett. {\bf 125}, 027002 (2020)]. In quadratic (Gaussian) approximation, the Goldstone (phase) and Higgs (amplitude) modes completely decouple. Each is described by a disordered Bogoliubov Hamiltonian which can be solved by an inhomogeneous multi-mode Bogoliubov transformation. We find that the Higgs mode is spatially localized in both phases. The correspondi…
We study the dynamic structure factor of a one-dimensional Bose gas confined in an optical lattice and modeled by the Bose-Hubbard Hamiltonian, using a variety of numerical and analytical approaches. The dynamic structure factor, experimentally measurable by Bragg spectroscopy, is studied in three relevant cases: in the clean regime, featuring either a superfluid or a Mott phase; and in the presence of two types of (quasi-)disordered external potentials: a quasi-periodic potential obtained from a bichromatic superlattice and a random-box disorder - both featuring a Bose glass phase. In the cle…
We study the problem of disordered interacting bosons within grand-canonical thermodynamics and Bogoliubov theory. We compute the fractions of condensed and non-condensed particles and corrections to the compressibility and the speed of sound due to interaction and disorder. There are two small parameters, the disorder strength compared to the chemical potential and the dilute-gas parameter.
We propose an exactly solvable model to reveal the physics of the interplay between interaction and disorder in bosonic systems. Considering interacting bosons in a double-well potential, in which disorder is mimicked by taking the energy level mismatch between the two wells to be randomly distributed, we find "two negatives make a positive" effect. While disorder or interaction by itself suppresses the phase coherence between the two wells, both together enhance the phase coherence. This model also captures several striking features of the disordered Bose-Hubbard model found in recent numeric…
We describe interacting bosons at low temperature in spatially correlated random potentials. By a Bogoliubov expansion around the deformed mean-field condensate, the fundamental Hamiltonian for elementary excitations is derived, achieving an analytical formulation in the case of weak disorder. From this, we calculate the sound velocity and true zero-temperature condensate depletion in correlated disorder and all dimensions.
One dimensional free-fermions and hard-core bosons are often considered to be equivalent. Indeed, when restricted to nearest-neighbor hopping on a chain the particles cannot exchange themselves, and therefore hardly experience their own statistics. Apart from the off-diagonal correlations which depends on the so-called Jordan-Wigner string, real-space observables are similar for free-fermions and hard-core bosons on a chain. Interestingly, by coupling only two chains, thus forming a two-leg ladder, particle exchange becomes allowed, and leads to a totally different physics between free-fermion…
We study the dynamics of one and two dimensional disordered lattice bosons/fermions initialized to a Fock state with a pattern of $1$ and $0$ particles on $A$ and ${\bar A}$ sites. For non-interacting systems we establish a universal relation between the long time density imbalance between $A$ and ${\bar A}$ site, $I(\infty)$, the localization length $ξ_l$, and the geometry of the initial pattern. For alternating initial pattern of $1$ and $0$ particles in 1 dimension, $I(\infty)=\tanh[a/ξ_l]$, where $a$ is the lattice spacing. For systems with mobility edge, we find analytic relations between…
Different regimes of entanglement growth under measurement have been demonstrated for quantum many-body systems, with an entangling phase for low measurement rates and a disentangling phase for high rates (quantum Zeno effect). Here we study entanglement growth on a disordered Bose-Fermi mixture with the bosons playing the role of the effective self-induced measurement for the fermions. Due to the interplay between the disorder and a non-Abelian symmetry, the model features an entanglement growth resonance when the boson-fermion interaction strength is varied. With the addition of a magnetic f…
We investigate one dimensional tight binding model in the presence of a correlated binary disorder. The disorder is due to the interaction of particles with heavy immobile other species. Off-diagonal disorder is created by means of a fast periodic modulation of interspecies interaction. The method based on transfer matrix techniques allows us to calculate the energies of extended modes in the correlated binary disorder. We focus on $N$-mer correlations and regain known results for the case of purely diagonal disorder. For off-diagonal disorder we find resonant energies. We discuss ambiguous pr…
We simulate ultra-cold interacting Bosons in quasi-one-dimensional, incommensurate optical lattices. In the tight-binding limit, these lattices have pseudo-random on-site energies and thus can potentially lead to Anderson localization. We explore the parameter regimes that lead to Anderson localization and investigate the role of repulsive interactions, harmonic confinement and finite temperature. We find that interactions can obscure the exponential localization characteristic of Anderson localization, thus impeding the direct observation of this phenomenon when interactions are present.
A spin-wave approach of the zero temperature superfluid-insulator transition for two-dimensional hard-core bosons in a random potential $μ=\pm$ W is developed. While at the classical level there is no intervening phase between the Bose-condensed superfluid (SF) and the gapped disordered insulator, the introduction of quantum fluctuations leads to a much richer physics. Upon increasing the disorder strength W, the Bose-condensed fraction disappears first, before the SF. Then a gapless Bose-glass phase emerges over a finite region until the insulator appears. Furthermore, in the strongly disorde…
We develop a diagrammatic scattering theory for interacting bosons in a three-dimensional, weakly disordered potential. We show how collisional energy transfer between the bosons induces the thermalization of the inelastic single-particle current which, after only few collision events, dominates over the elastic contribution described by the Gross-Pitaevskii ansatz.
