Transport of Hubbard-Band Quasiparticles in Disordered Optical Lattices

TL;DR

This paper develops a theory for Hubbard-band quasiparticle transport in disordered optical lattices, explaining experimental suppression of diffusion as Anderson localization, and providing insights into many-body quantum localization phenomena.

Contribution

The authors introduce a tailored transport theory for Hubbard-band quasiparticles in trapped optical lattices, directly comparing it with experiments without fitting parameters.

Findings

Transport suppression aligns with Hubbard-band quasiparticle localization.

Finite entropy only partly explains transport suppression.

Complete suppression is consistent with Anderson localization.

Abstract

Quantum degenerate gases trapped in optical lattices are ideal testbeds for fundamental physics because these systems are tunable, well characterized, and isolated from the environment. Controlled disorder can be introduced to explore suppression of quantum diffusion in the absence of conventional dephasing mechanisms such as phonons, which are unavoidable in experiments on electronic solids. Recent experiments use transport of degenerate Fermi gases in optical lattices (Kondov et al. Phys. Rev. Lett. 114, 083002 (2015)) to probe a particularly extreme regime of strong interaction in what can be modeled as an Anderson-Hubbard model. These experiments find evidence for an intriguing insulating phase where quantum diffusion is completely suppressed by strong disorder. Quantitative interpretation of these experiments remains an open problem that requires inclusion of non-zero entropy, strong interaction, and trapping. We argue that the suppression of transport can be thought of as localization of Hubbard-band quasiparticles. We construct a theory of transport of Hubbard-band quasiparticles tailored to trapped optical lattice experiments. We compare the theory directly with center-of-mass transport experiments of Kondov et al. with no fitting parameters. The close agreement between theory and experiments shows that the suppression of transport is only partly due to finite entropy effects. We argue that the complete suppression of transport is consistent with Anderson localization of Hubbard-band quasiparticles. The combination of our theoretical framework and optical lattice experiments offers an important platform for studying localization in isolated many-body quantum systems.