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 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.
We investigate the transport properties in out-of-equilibrium dynamics of strongly correlated dipolar fermions initially localized in one-dimensional inhomogeneous optical lattice. The dynamics is studied by experimentally measurable dynamical variables such as one-body density, pair-correlation function and size of the expanding cloud. In the noninteracting limit, we trace the usual fingerprints of ballistic expansion in the short time dynamics. However, dynamics is strongly affected by system size due to Pauli principle. The dynamics also exhibits significant dependence on the sign of the interactions. We observe that strong repulsive dipolar interaction gives rise to many-body features in the dynamics, while strong attractive dipolar interaction leads to stabilized cluster states. Intermediate dipolar interaction are found to hinder expansion of correlations, while very strong dipolar interaction favors expansion of the cloud. Our work show the effect of dipolar interaction in the transport properties of interacting fermions, that can be studied in on-going experiments with ultracold dipolar fermions.
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.
The effects of frustration on extended supersolid states is a largely unexplored subject in the realm of cold-atom systems. In this work, we explore the impact of quasicrystalline lattices on the supersolid phases of dipolar bosons. Our findings reveal that weak quasicrystalline lattices can induce a variety of modulated phases, merging the inherent solid pattern with a quasiperiodic decoration induced by the external potential. As the lattice becomes stronger, we observe a superquasicrystal phase and a Bose glass phase. Our results, supported by a detailed discussion on experimental feasibility using dysprosium atoms and quasicrystalline optical lattice potentials, open a new avenue in the exploration of long-range interacting quantum systems in aperiodic environments. We provide a solid foundation for future experimental investigations, potentially confirming our theoretical predictions and contributing profoundly to the field of quantum gases in complex external potentials.
Quasicrystals are long-range ordered and yet non-periodic. This interplay results in a wealth of intriguing physical phenomena, such as the inheritance of topological properties from higher dimensions, self-similarity, and the presence of non-trivial structure on all scales. The concept of aperiodic order has been extensively studied in mathematics and geometry, exemplified by the celebrated Penrose tiling. However, the understanding of physical quasicrystals (the vast majority of them are intermetallic compounds) is still incomplete owing to their complexity, regarding both growth processes and stability. Ultracold atoms in optical lattices offer an ideal, yet untested environment for investigating quasicrystals. Optical lattices, i.e. standing waves of light, allow the defect-free formation of a large variety of potential landscapes, including quasiperiodic geometries. In recent years, optical lattices have become one of the most successful tools in the large-scale quantum simulation of condensed-matter problems. This study presents the first experimental realisation of a two-dimensional quasicrystalline potential for ultracold atoms, based on an eightfold symmetric optical lattice. It is aimed at bringing together the fields of ultracold atoms and quasicrystals – and the more general concept of aperiodic order. The first part of this thesis introduces the theoretical aspects of aperiodic order and quasicrystalline structure. The second part comprises a detailed account of the newly designed apparatus that has been used to produce quantum-degenerate gases in quasicrystalline lattices. The third and final part summarises the matter-wave diffraction experiments that have been performed in various lattice geometries. These include one- and two-dimensional simple cubic lattices, one-dimensional quasiperiodic lattices, as well as two-dimensional quasicrystalline lattices. The striking self-similarity of this quasicrystalline structure has been directly observed, in close analogy to Shechtman’s very first discovery of quasicrystals using electron diffraction. In addition, an in-depth study of the diffraction dynamics reveals the fundamental differences between periodic and quasicrystalline lattices, in excellent agreement with ab initio theory. The diffraction dynamics on short timescales constitutes a continuous-time quantum walk on a homogeneous four-dimensional tight-binding lattice. On the one hand, these measurements establish a novel experimental platform for investigating quasicrystals proper. On the other hand, ultracold atoms in quasicrystalline optical lattices are worth studying in their own right: Possible avenues include the observation many-body localisation and Bose glasses, as well as the creation of topologically non-trivial systems in higher dimensions.
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.
Deterministic quasiperiodicity in quantum systems has long been associated with localization, criticality, or glassy behavior, and has therefore been believed to suppress long-range order rather than stabilize it. Here we demonstrate the opposite: quasiperiodicity in interactions--without any quasiperiodic potential, disorder, or geometric modulation--can generate coherent, ordered quantum phases. We study hard-core bosons in one dimension with quasiperiodic long-range interactions, V_{ij}=V_0 \cos(παi)\cos(παj), where n=α=(\sqrt{5}-1)/2 is the inverse golden ratio. Using large-scale path-integral quantum Monte Carlo simulations, we uncover thermodynamically stable incompressible plateaus at irrational densities tied to Fibonacci ratios. These plateaus exhibit sharp incommensurate Bragg peaks, signaling an emergent quasi-solid with long-range quasicrystalline density order. More strikingly, at nearby fillings and interaction strengths, we identify a quasi-supersolid phase that supports both Fibonacci density ordering and finite superfluid density--demonstrating that interaction-induced quasiperiodicity can stabilize supersolid coherence. Our results establish a new mechanism for realizing ordered quasicrystalline quantum matter, and provide realistic guidance for implementation in Rydberg atom arrays, multimode cavity-QED systems, and trapped-ion quantum simulators.