Finite-temperature effects on interacting bosonic 1D systems in disordered lattices

TL;DR

This paper investigates how finite temperature influences the insulating phases of interacting 1D bosons in disordered lattices, using numerical methods and experiments to understand thermal effects on quantum coherence and localization.

Contribution

It provides a detailed analysis of thermal effects on the phase diagram of 1D bosonic systems in quasi-periodic lattices, highlighting the preservation of the Bose glass phase at strong interactions and introducing a method to estimate temperature from experimental data.

Findings

Thermal correlation lengths are short at weak interactions, affecting coherence.

At strong interactions, thermal correlation lengths exceed localization lengths, preserving quantum phases.

Finite-temperature DMRG can estimate temperature from experimental results.

Abstract

We analyze the finite-temperature effects on the phase diagram describing the insulating properties of interacting 1D bosons in a quasi-periodic lattice. We examine thermal effects by comparing experimental results to exact diagonalization for small-sized systems and to density-matrix renormalization group (DMRG) computations. At weak interactions, we find short thermal correlation lengths, indicating a substantial impact of temperature on the system coherence. Conversely, at strong interactions, the obtained thermal correlation lengths are significantly larger than the localization length, and the quantum nature of the T=0 Bose glass phase is preserved up to a crossover temperature that depends on the disorder strength. Furthermore, in the absence of disorder, we show how quasi-exact finite-T DMRG computations, compared to experimental results, can be employed to estimate the temperature, which is not directly accessible in the experiment.