Equilibration Dynamics of Strongly Interacting Bosons in 2D Lattices with Disorder

TL;DR

This paper investigates how strongly interacting bosons in 2D lattices with disorder behave dynamically, using Gutzwiller mean-field theory to explain experimental observations and highlighting the challenge in differentiating glassy dynamics from many-body localization.

Contribution

It demonstrates that Gutzwiller mean-field theory effectively captures key experimental features of disordered bosonic systems, emphasizing the need for further experimental and theoretical work.

Findings

GMFT reproduces main experimental observations

Disorder and interactions compete to influence dynamics

Distinguishing glassy dynamics from many-body localization remains challenging

Abstract

Motivated by recent optical lattice experiments [J.-y. Choi et al., Science 352, 1547 (2016)], we study the dynamics of strongly interacting bosons in the presence of disorder in two dimensions. We show that Gutzwiller mean-field theory (GMFT) captures the main experimental observations, which are a result of the competition between disorder and interactions. Our findings highlight the difficulty in distinguishing glassy dynamics, which can be captured by GMFT, and many-body localization, which cannot be captured by GMFT, and indicate the need for further experimental studies of this system.