Disorder-induced regular dynamics in oscillating lattices

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that weak disorder in oscillating lattices can induce a transition from diffusive to regular particle motion, leading to observable peaks in velocity distributions, with implications for cold atom experiments.

Contribution

It reveals that disorder can induce regular dynamics in oscillating lattices, a counterintuitive finding that enhances understanding of particle behavior in disordered periodic systems.

Findings

Disorder causes particles to transition from diffusive to regular motion.

Localized disorder leads to accumulation in regular phase space structures.

Pronounced peaks in velocity distributions are observable in experiments.

Abstract

We explore the impact of weak disorder on the dynamics of classical particles in a periodically oscillating lattice. It is demonstrated that the disorder induces a hopping process from diffusive to regular motion i.e. we observe the counterintuitive phenomenon that disorder leads to regular behaviour. If the disorder is localized in a finite-sized part of the lattice, the described hopping causes initially diffusive particles to even accumulate in regular structures of the corresponding phase space. A hallmark of this accumulation is the emergence of pronounced peaks in the velocity distribution of particles which should be detectable in state of the art experiments e.g. with cold atoms in optical lattices.