• DOI:10.1126/science.aaa7432
• Corpus ID: 5112350

Observation of many-body localization of interacting fermions in a quasirandom optical lattice

@article{Schreiber2015ObservationOM,
  title={Observation of many-body localization of interacting fermions in a quasirandom optical lattice},
  author={Michael Schreiber and Sean S. Hodgman and Pranjal Bordia and Henrik P. L{\"u}schen and Mark H. Fischer and Ronen Vosk and Ehud Altman and Ulrich Schneider and Immanuel Bloch},
  journal={Science},
  year={2015},
  volume={349},
  pages={842 - 845}
}

• M. Schreiber, S. Hodgman, +6 authors I. Bloch
• Published 22 January 2015
• Physics
• Science

Making interacting atoms localize Disorder can stop the transport of noninteracting particles in its tracks. This phenomenon, known as Anderson localization, occurs in disordered solids, as well as photonic and cold atom settings. Interactions tend to make localization less likely, but disorder, interactions, and localization may coexist in the so-called many-body localized state. Schreiber et al. detect many-body localization in a one-dimensional optical lattice initially filled with atoms occupying alternating sites. Externally induced disorder and interactions prevented the system from evolving quickly to a state with a single atom on each site. Science, this issue p. 842 Disorder and interactions are tuned to induce nonergodic behavior in an atomic system in a one-dimensional optical lattice. Many-body localization (MBL), the disorder-induced localization of interacting particles, signals a breakdown of conventional thermodynamics because MBL systems do not thermalize and show nonergodic time evolution. We experimentally observed this nonergodic evolution for interacting fermions in a one-dimensional quasirandom optical lattice and identified the MBL transition through the relaxation dynamics of an initially prepared charge density wave. For sufficiently weak disorder, the time evolution appears ergodic and thermalizing, erasing all initial ordering, whereas above a critical disorder strength, a substantial portion of the initial ordering persists. The critical disorder value shows a distinctive dependence on the interaction strength, which is in agreement with numerical simulations. Our experiment paves the way to further detailed studies of MBL, such as in noncorrelated disorder or higher dimensions.