Motivated by recent experiments in fermionic polar gases, we study the nonequilibrium dynamics of two-component dipolar fermions subject to a quasiperiodic potential. We investigate the localization of charge and spin degrees of freedom time evolving with a long-range spin-SU(2) symmetric fermionic Hamiltonian by calculating experimentally accessible dynamical observables. To study the nonequilibrium dynamics, we start the time evolution with two initial states at half-filling: (i) product state with doublons $|\ensuremath{\uparrow}\ensuremath{\downarrow}0\ensuremath{\uparrow}\ensuremath{\downarrow}0\ensuremath{\uparrow}\ensuremath{\downarrow}0\ensuremath{\uparrow}\ensuremath{\downarrow}0\ensuremath{\uparrow}\ensuremath{\downarrow}\ensuremath{\rangle}$ and (ii) product state with singlons $|\ensuremath{\uparrow}\ensuremath{\downarrow}\phantom{\rule{4pt}{0ex}}\ensuremath{\uparrow}\ensuremath{\downarrow}\phantom{\rule{4pt}{0ex}}\ensuremath{\uparrow}\ensuremath{\downarrow}\phantom{\rule{4pt}{0ex}}\ensuremath{\uparrow}\ensuremath{\downarrow}\phantom{\rule{4pt}{0ex}}\ensuremath{\uparrow}\ensuremath{\downarrow}\phantom{\rule{4pt}{0ex}}\ensuremath{\rangle}$. We carried out the real-time evolution via the fermionic Hamiltonian using exact diagonalization (ED) and the time-dependent variational principle (TDVP) for finite matrix product states (MPS), within experimentally relevant timescales. For the product state with doublons, we observe a delocalized to localized phase transition varying disorder strengths by monitoring the decay of charge imbalance with time. For the long-range interacting Hamiltonian of our focus, and in the presence of strong enough disorder, starting the time evolution with singlons we find a strong reduction in the spin delocalization, contrary to results of previous studies using the disordered short-range (on-site) Hubbard model with SU(2) symmetry. In addition to the quench dynamics, we also demonstrate the localization of charge and spin in the full energy spectrum of the long-range spin-SU(2) symmetric Hamiltonian by monitoring spin and charge autocorrelation functions. Our predictions for localization of both charge and spin should be observable in ultracold experiments with fermionic dipolar atoms subject to a quasiperiodic potential.
Motivated by recent experiments in fermionic polar gases, we study the nonequilibrium dynamics of two-component dipolar fermions subject to a quasiperiodic potential. We investigate the localization of charge and spin degrees of freedom time evolving with a long-range spin-SU(2) symmetric fermionic Hamiltonian by calculating experimentally accessible dynamical observables. To study the nonequilibrium dynamics, we start the time evolution with two initial states at half-filling: (i) product state with doublons ∣\ensuremath↑\ensuremath↓0\ensuremath↑\ensuremath↓0\ensuremath↑\ensuremath↓0\ensuremath↑\ensuremath↓0\ensuremath↑\ensuremath↓\ensuremath⟩ and (ii) product state with singlons ∣\ensuremath↑\ensuremath↓\ensuremath↑\ensuremath↓\ensuremath↑\ensuremath↓\ensuremath↑\ensuremath↓\ensuremath↑\ensuremath↓\ensuremath⟩. We carried out the real-time evolution via the fermionic Hamiltonian using exact diagonalization (ED) and the time-dependent variational principle (TDVP) for finite matrix product states (MPS), within experimentally relevant timescales. For the product state with doublons, we observe a delocalized to localized phase transition varying disorder strengths by monitoring the decay of charge imbalance with time. For the long-range interacting Hamiltonian of our focus, and in the presence of strong enough disorder, starting the time evolution with singlons we find a strong reduction in the spin delocalization, contrary to results of previous studies using the disordered short-range (on-site) Hubbard model with SU(2) symmetry. In addition to the quench dynamics, we also demonstrate the localization of charge and spin in the full energy spectrum of the long-range spin-SU(2) symmetric Hamiltonian by monitoring spin and charge autocorrelation functions. Our predictions for localization of both charge and spin should be observable in ultracold experiments with fermionic dipolar atoms subject to a quasiperiodic potential.
Quasiperiodic potentials can be used to interpolate between localization and delocalization in one dimension. With the rise of optical platforms engineering dipolar interactions, a key question is the stability of quasicrystalline phases under these long-range interactions. In this work, we study repulsive ultracold dipolar fermions in a quasiperiodic optical lattice to characterize the behavior of interacting quasicrystals. We simulate the full time evolution of the typical experimental protocols used to probe quasicrystalline order and localization properties. We extract experimentally measurable dynamical observables and correlation functions to characterize the three phases observed in the noninteracting setting: localized, intermediate, and extended. We then study the stability of such phases to repulsive dipolar interactions. We find that dipolar interactions can completely alter the shape of the phase diagram by stabilizing the intermediate phase, mostly at the expense of the extended phase. Moreover, in the strongly interacting regime, a resonance-like behavior characterized by density oscillations appears. Remarkably, strong dipolar repulsions can also localize particles even in the absence of quasiperiodicity if the primary lattice is sufficiently deep. Our work shows that dipolar interactions in a quasiperiodic potential can give rise to a complex, tunable coexistence of localized and extended quantum states.
Quasiperiodic potentials and dipolar interactions each impose long-range order in quantum systems, but their interplay unlocks a rich landscape of unexplored quantum phases. In this work, we investigate how dipolar bosonic crystals respond to correlated disorder in the form of quasiperiodic potentials. Using exact numerical simulations and a suite of observables—including order parameters, energy, density distributions, and two-body coherence measures—we explore one-dimensional dipolar bosons in quasiperiodic lattices at both commensurate and incommensurate fillings. Our results reveal a complex competition between superfluid, Mott-insulator, density-wave, and crystalline phases, governed by the intricate balance of dipolar interactions, kinetic energy, and disorder strength. Crucially, we identify mechanisms that influence dipolar crystals, showing their surprising robustness even in the presence of strong quasiperiodic disorder. Strikingly, we challenge previous claims by demonstrating that a crystal phase—expected to precede full crystallization—does not emerge in the ground state. Instead, its traits appear only under moderate disorder, but never fully develop, giving way to a direct transition from a charge density wave to a crystal state. These findings provide new insights into the resilience of many-body quantum phases in complex environments and pave the way for engineering exotic quantum states in ultracold atomic systems.
We calculate the nonequilibrium dynamic evolution of a one-dimensional system of two-component fermionic atoms after a strong local quench by using a time-dependent spin-density-functional theory. The interaction quench is also considered to see its influence on the spin-charge separation. It is shown that the charge velocity is larger than the spin velocity for the system of on-site repulsive interaction (Luttinger liquid), and vise versa for the system of on-site attractive interaction (Luther-Emery liquid). We find that both the interaction quench and polarization suppress the spin-charge separation.
The dynamics of a one-dimensional two-component Fermi gas in the presence of a quasiperiodic optical lattice (OL) is investigated by means of a density functional theory approach. Inspired by the protocol implemented in recent cold-atom experiments---designed to identify the many-body localization transition---we analyze the relaxation of an initially prepared imbalance between the occupation number of odd and of even sites. For quasidisorder strength beyond the Anderson localization transition, the imbalance survives for long times, indicating the inability of the system to reach local equilibrium. The late-time value of the imbalance diminishes for increasing interaction strength. Close to the critical quasidisorder strength corresponding to the noninteracting (Anderson) transition, the interacting system displays an extremely slow relaxation dynamics, consistent with subdiffusive behavior. The amplitude of the imbalance fluctuations around its running average is found to decrease with time, and such damping is more effective with increasing interaction strengths. While our study addresses the setup with two equally intense OLs, very similar effects due to interactions have been observed also in recent cold-atom experiments performed in the tight-binding regime, i.e., where one of the two OLs is very deep and the other is much weaker.
Quench dynamics in a two-dimensional system of interacting fermions is analyzed within the semiclassical truncated Wigner approximation (TWA). The models with short-range and long-range interactions are considered. We show that in the latter case, the TWA is very accurate, becoming asymptotically exact in the infinite-range limit, provided that the semiclassical Hamiltonian is correctly identified. Within the TWA, different dynamical timescales of charges and spins can be clearly distinguished. Interestingly, for a weak and moderate disorder strength, we observe subdiffusive behavior of charges, while spins exhibit diffusive dynamics. At strong disorder, the quantum Fisher information shows logarithmic growth in time with a slower increase for charges than for spins. It is shown that in contrast to the short-range model, strong inhomogeneities such as domain walls in the initial state can significantly slow down thermalization dynamics, especially at weak disorder. This behavior can put additional challenges in designing cold-atom experimental protocols aimed to analyze possible many-body localization in such systems. While within this approach we cannot make any definite statements about the existence of a many-body localized phase, we see a very fast crossover as a function of disorder strength from rapidly thermalizing to a slow glassylike regime both for the short-range and long-range models.
This thesis concerns the physics of ultracold bosons in quasicrystalline lattices, studied by means of quantum simulation using ultracold 39K atoms loaded to an eight-fold rotationally symmetric optical quasicrystal. Quasicrystalline and quasiperiodic systems, thanks to their long-range order and lack of periodicity, exhibit a wealth of interesting properties such as a dense and self-similar momentum space, and a localization transition to Anderson insulator or Bose glass states (in non-interacting or interacting cases respectively) reminiscent of that in disordered systems, whilst lacking the rare regions that typically exist in such systems. Here we will cover experiments into this system’s behaviour in both equilibrium and non-equilibrium settings. First, we focus on mapping out its phase diagram in both weakly and strongly interacting regimes. We observe consistency with numerical predictions for the superfluid-Bose glass phase transition using coherence measurements, as well as finding a region of roughly zero compressibility around where the numerics predicts the existence of a Mott insulator ground state. We also study which regimes of the phase diagram can be ramped through adiabatically, finding that entropy is created upon traversing the Bose glass phase irrespective of ramp duration, which we attribute to its localized nature. Next we look into the dynamics of the system after a quench of the lattice depth in the weakly interacting regime. Upon quenching from the superfluid regime to the Bose glass regime, we observe a quantum walk to higher order diffraction peaks in momentum space whose maximum order is unbounded by kinetic energy thanks to the dense, self-similar nature of the quasicrystal’s momentum space. Quenching in the opposite direction we observe instead a walk between sites in real space for short times by looking at the position (as opposed to momentum) space autocorrelation function of the cloud, finding an expansion rate in agreement with an intuitive estimate based on the Lieb-Robinson bounds of a periodic system. We also look into the timescales of these dynamics in the context of what we might expect from the underlying Hamiltonian, before finally investigating the loss of coherence exhibited by the system after a slower quench of the lattice depth from an initially superfluid cloud. We observe that coherence is lost sooner after the quench for deeper final lattices, with the loss becoming almost instantaneous for quenches that cross the localization transition across the whole cloud. After this we explore the system’s transport dynamics by means of a quench to an excited state at the same time as an additional confining potential is switched off. We observe that unlike in the case of a periodic square lattice, where ballistic expansion that scales with the tunnelling strength occurs in the non-interacting case before becoming slower upon the introduction of interactions thanks to diffusion, in the quasicrystal the transport rate no longer scales with tunnelling strength. Instead we observe a drop relative to the tunnelling rate by 2 − 3 orders of magnitude as the lattice depth is increased from 1Er to 5Er with little dependence on the interaction strength. We also note that the finite rate measured for the deeper lattices is potentially an overestimate since the finite loss rate of atoms makes mass transport indistinguishable from density-dependent losses at that point. Finally, we discuss use of a quantum gas magnification scheme with which to magnify the real space density distribution of our atoms such that it can be measured with single-site resolution. Some preliminary results are presented regarding how the density distribution changes with lattice depth in the weakly interacting regime, in which we observe that as lattice depth increases a higher proportion of atoms occupy deeper sites close to the centre of the quasicrystal’s configuration space, as we might expect.