Erlangen 2018 – scientific programme
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Q: Fachverband Quantenoptik und Photonik
Q 28: Cold atoms V - optical lattices (joint session A/Q)
Q 28.4: Talk
Tuesday, March 6, 2018, 14:45–15:00, K 0.011
Coupling a finite thermal bath to a many-body localized system — •Antonio Rubio-Abadal1, Jae-yoon Choi1, Johannes Zeiher1, Simon Hollerith1, Jun Rui1, Immanuel Bloch1,2, and Christian Gross1 — 1Max-Planck-Institut für Quantenoptik, Hans-Kopfermann-Straße 1, 85748 Garching, Germany — 2Fakultät für Physik, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Schellingstraße 4, 80799 München,
The thermalization of an isolated quantum system can fail in the presence of quenched disorder, even with interactions. This phenomenon, known as many-body localization (MBL), has been recently the focus of much theoretical work, though many open questions still remain regarding its existence in higher dimensions or its robustness to a finite bath coupling. Ultracold atoms in optical lattices have emerged as an extremely suitable platform for the study of MBL, and promise to shed light into some of its properties.
In our experiment, we use a quantum-gas microscope with projected disorder to study the dynamics of a quenched state of bosons in two dimensions, where we observe a remaining memory of the initially prepared state by measuring the evolution of its imbalance. By introducing a second bosonic species unaffected by the disorder potential, a thermal component has been added to the system, and we have measured its effect on the disordered component, which in the presence of a big enough thermal component ultimately loses its imbalance.