Bath mediated decay of density waves in a disordered Bose lattice gas

TL;DR

This paper investigates how a disordered Bose lattice gas's density waves decay when coupled to a bath of disorder-free atoms, revealing a transition from localized to ergodic behavior influenced by particle loss.

Contribution

It introduces a stochastic mean field model that captures the experimental transition between localized and ergodic phases in a disordered Bose gas with bath interactions.

Findings

Transition from localized to ergodic behavior with increasing bath size

Particle loss significantly affects the decay dynamics

Model reproduces key experimental observations

Abstract

Motivated by a recent experiment, we study the dynamics of bosons in a disordered optical lattice, interacting with a variably sized bath of disorder free atoms. As the number of particles in the bath is increased, there is a transition between "localized" and "ergodic" behavior, which are characterized by the long-time behavior of an initial density wave. We model the dynamics with a stochastic mean field theory, reproducing the central observations of the experiment. A key conclusion from our study is that particle loss plays an important role.