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arXiv:0810.4411 · Physical Review Letters

Compression as a Tool to Detect Bose Glass in a Cold Atomic Gas

Dominique Delande, Jakub Zakrzewski

Published Feb 23, 2009• 30 citations
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Abstract

We suggest that measuring the variation of the radius of an atomic cloud when the harmonic trap confinement is varied makes it possible to monitor the disappearance of the insulating Mott phase of an ultracold atomic gas trapped in a disordered optical lattice. This paves the way for an unambiguous identification of a Bose glass phase in the system.

DOI
10.1103/physrevlett.102.085301

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We suggest that measuring the variation of the radius of an atomic cloud when the harmonic trap confinement is varied makes it possible to monitor the disappearance of the insulating Mott phase of an ultracold atomic gas trapped in a disordered optical lattice. This paves the way for an unambiguous identification of a Bose glass phase in the system.
We theoretically analyze the response properties of ultracold bosons in optical lattices to the static variation of the trapping potential. We show that, upon an increase of such a potential (trap squeezing), the density variations in a central region, with linear size of ≲10 wavelengths, reflect that of the bulk system upon changing the chemical potential: hence measuring the density variations gives direct access to the bulk compressibility . When combined with standard time-of-flight measurements, this approach has the potential of unambiguously detecting the appearance of the most fundamental phases realized by bosons in optical lattices, with or without further external potentials: superfluid, Mott insulator, band insulator and Bose glass.
Disorder can be applied to transform conducting to insulating states by localizing individual quantum particles. The interplay between disorder and interactions in many-particle systems leads to a richer tapestry of quantum phase transitions. Here, we report the measurement in an ultracold lattice gas of a disorder-induced transition from a state with small disorder-independent compressibility to a state for which compressibility increases with disorder. At zero temperature this is the transition from a Mott insulator (MI) to a Bose glass (BG), both of which are insulating states. This transformation is observed using measurements of core compressibility. By determining how double occupancy changes with atom number, we identify the threshold disorder strength required to switch from disorder-independent MI-like to disorder-dependent BG-like compressible behavior.
Ultracold atoms in optical lattices realize simple condensed matter models. We create an ensemble of ≈60 harmonically trapped 2D Bose-Hubbard systems from a 87Rb Bose-Einstein condensate in an optical lattice and use a magnetic resonance imaging approach to select a few 2D systems for study, thereby eliminating ensemble averaging. Our identification of the transition from superfluid to Mott insulator, as a function of both atom density and lattice depth, is in excellent agreement with a universal state diagram [M. Rigol, Phys. Rev. A 79 053605 (2009)] suitable for our trapped system. In agreement with theory, our data suggest a failure of the local density approximation in the transition region.
We use a bichromatic optical lattice to experimentally realize a disordered system of ultracold strongly interacting 87Rb bosons. In the absence of disorder, the atoms are pinned by repulsive interactions in the sites of an ideal optical crystal, forming one-dimensional Mott-insulator states. We measure the excitation spectrum of the system as a function of disorder strength and characterize its phase-coherence properties with a time-of-flight technique. Increasing disorder, we observe a broadening of the Mott-insulator resonances and the transition to a state with vanishing long-range phase coherence and a flat density of excitations, which suggest the formation of a Bose-glass phase.
In recent years ultracold atoms in optical lattices have been extensively employed as quantum simulators to study the physics of conventional solid state systems. Due to the possibility of introducing controlled disorder, it appears now a straightforward progression to use ultracold atoms in optical potentials to also study the physics of complex systems. We experimentally study a system of bosonic 87Rb atoms in a 3D optical lattice, where disorder is introduced on the length scale of the lattice sites by using an auxiliary optical lattice with a non‐commensurate wavelength. Increasing the amount of disorder, we observe the transition from a Mott Insulator state to a novel gapless insulating phase induced by the cooperation of interactions and disorder, which could be identified with a Bose Glass phase. We discuss the experimental results as well as possible additional techniques for a better diagnostic of the system and future implementations of the two‐color lattices in the study of different disorder‐induced phenomena.
We discuss a technique to probe the properties of an interacting cold atomic gas that can be viewed as a dynamical compressibility measurement. We apply this technique to the study of the superfluid-to-Mott-insulator quantum phase transition in one and three dimensions for a bosonic gas trapped in an optical lattice. Excitations of the system are detected by time-of-flight measurements. The experimental data for the one-dimensional case are in good agreement with the results of a time-dependent density-matrix-renormalization-group calculation.