Anderson localization has evolved far beyond the conventional dichotomy between extended and localized states. Modern localization theory predicts a complete transport hierarchy comprising extended, critical, and localized phases together with all coexistence phases among them, forming a seven-phase Anderson-localization landscape. Despite its fundamental importance, this hierarchy has never been experimentally realized within a single system. Here we realize the complete seven-phase Anderson-localization landscape in a one-dimensional Floquet photonic lattice. By engineering quasiperiodic hopping profiles containing inhomogeneously distributed hopping zeros, we generate critical states and enable their coexistence with extended and localized sectors. The resulting transport regimes are directly resolved through their distinct spatiotemporal dynamics, including ballistic expansion, confined critical oscillations, and persistent localization. We observe all seven phases, including the elusive triply coexisting extended-critical-localized phase, and experimentally track the phase transitions connecting them. Our results establish the first complete experimental map of the Anderson-localization landscape and provide a unified platform for investigating mobility edges, multifractality, and programmable coherent transport.
Anderson localization has evolved far beyond the conventional dichotomy between extended and localized states. Modern localization theory predicts a complete transport hierarchy comprising extended, critical, and localized phases together with all coexistence phases among them, forming a seven-phase Anderson-localization landscape. Despite its fundamental importance, this hierarchy has never been experimentally realized within a single system. Here we realize the complete seven-phase Anderson-localization landscape in a one-dimensional Floquet photonic lattice. By engineering quasiperiodic hopping profiles containing inhomogeneously distributed hopping zeros, we generate critical states and enable their coexistence with extended and localized sectors. The resulting transport regimes are directly resolved through their distinct spatiotemporal dynamics, including ballistic expansion, confined critical oscillations, and persistent localization. We observe all seven phases, including the elusive triply coexisting extended-critical-localized phase, and experimentally track the phase transitions connecting them. Our results establish the first complete experimental map of the Anderson-localization landscape and provide a unified platform for investigating mobility edges, multifractality, and programmable coherent transport.
Extended, localized, and critical states form the three elementary classes of eigenstates underlying Anderson localization. While phases involving extended and localized states are widely studied, experimental realization of critical phases, particularly those where critical states coexist with others, remains a challenge. Here, we report to realize five distinct localization phases: extended, localized, critical, extended-localized mixed, and critical-localized mixed, in a one-dimensional Floquet lattice with quasiperiodic hopping amplitudes and on-site potentials. These phases are identified through characteristic spatiotemporal dynamics, supported by mutually consistent experimental observations and theoretical analysis. Our findings establish a unified experimental framework for systematic studies of localization transitions, mobility edges, and criticality in driven quasiperiodic systems.
Abstract Anderson localization physics features three fundamental types of eigenstates: extended, localized, and critical. Confirming the presence of critical states necessitates either advancing the analysis to the thermodynamic limit or identifying a universal mechanism which can rigorously determine these states. Here we report the unambiguous experimental realization of critical states, governed by a rigorous mechanism for exact quantum critical states, and further observe a generalized mechanism that quasiperiodic zeros in hopping couplings protect the critical states. We implement a programmable quasiperiodic mosaic model with tunable couplings and on-site potentials through a multiple spin qubit system. By measuring the time-evolving observables, we identify the coexisting delocalized dynamics and incommensurately distributed zeros in the couplings, which are the defining features of the critical states. We map the localized-to-critical phase transition and demonstrate that critical states persist until quasiperiodic zeros are removed by strong long-range couplings, highlighting a novel generalized mechanism discovered in this experiment and shown with rigorous theory. Finally, we resolve the energy-dependent transition between localized and critical states, revealing the presence of anomalous mobility edges.
The disordered quantum world hosts three fundamental types of states: extended, localized, and critical, of which the critical states are confined to fine-tuned critical points or mobility edges in randomly disordered systems. The tripartite phase, with all three types of states coexisting over finite spectral windows, represents a hallmark distinction between quasiperiodic and truly random systems in the localization physics. Here, we report the realization of this exotic phase in a quasi-periodically driven orbital optical lattice with ultracold atoms. The optical lattice with a quasiperiodic Floquet modulation coupling s and p orbitals is realized in experiment and shown to host the tripartite phase from exact theory. We develop a two-stage protocol to precisely prepare and detect the three types of quantum states. The characteristic exponents of these states are determined from expansion dynamics, showing their distinct universal transport properties. Our study marks a significant advancement in exploring unconventional critical phenomena and localization physics with ultracold atoms.
Anderson localization of particles -- the complete halt of wave transport through multiple scattering and phase coherence -- is a paradigmatic manifestation of quantum interference in disordered media. In three dimensions, the scaling theory predicts a quantum phase transition at a critical energy, the mobility edge, separating localized from diffusive states and underpinning metal-insulator transitions in electronic systems. Despite decades of experimental efforts, a direct observation of this emblematic transition for matter waves has remained elusive. Previous attempts with ultracold atoms were hindered by strong and uncontrolled energy broadening, resulting in indirect, sometimes inaccurate, and model-dependent estimates of the mobility edge. Here we implement a novel energy-resolved scheme to prepare atomic matter waves with a narrow energy distribution and track their expansion dynamics over long timescales. This allows for a direct observation of the three-dimensional Anderson transition in a laser-speckle disordered potential, and for a precise measurement of the mobility edge that is independent of any underlying theoretical modeling. Our measurements show excellent agreement with state-of-the-art numerical predictions over a wide range of disorder strengths, resolving long-standing discrepancies between prior experiments and theory. Beyond the three-dimensional Anderson transition, our approach opens new avenues for quantitative investigations of quantum critical phenomena in spatially disordered systems, including the roles of dimensionality, symmetry class, and interactions.
Conventionally a mobility edge (ME) marks a critical energy that separates two different transport zones where all states are extended and localized, respectively. Here we propose a quasiperiodic spin-orbit coupled lattice model with experimental feasibility to realize a quantum phase with three coexisting energy-dependent zones, i.e., the extended, critical, and localized zones, and uncover the underlying generic mechanism for the occurrence of this quantum phase. Accordingly, this phase exhibits types of MEs which separate the extended states from critical ones and the localized states from critical ones, respectively. We introduce the diagnostic quantities to characterize and distinguish the different zones and show that the predicted phase can be detected by measuring the fractal dimension or conductivities. The experimental realization is also proposed and studied. This work extends the concept of ME and enriches the quantum phases in disordered systems, which sheds light on searching for localization and critical phenomena with transport and thermoelectric effects.
We systematically investigate the entanglement and information dynamics of quasiperiodic systems across their extended, critical, and localized phases, aiming to identify dynamical signatures that can reveal the multifractal spatial structure of critical states and distinguish critical phases from the extended and localized regimes. Focusing on the generalized Aubry-André-Harper model, we complement the half-chain entanglement entropy with the spatially resolved subsystem information capacity (SIC) and demonstrate that critical states exhibit pronounced spatial heterogeneity absent in the extended and localized phases. In the steady state, the SIC reveals a stepwise ramp as a function of subsystem size, reflecting an underlying fragmentation of the chain into weakly connected subregions. Dynamically, information initially localized within such a subregion can undergo coherent long-lived oscillations, dubbed subregion echoes, whose period scales with the subregion length, in quantitative agreement with a quasiparticle picture of confined quasiparticle reflections. We trace this internal fragmentation to the incommensurately distributed zeros (IDZs) in the off-diagonal hopping terms of the Hamiltonian. To establish the generality of the SIC as a diagnostic tool, we further apply it to a mobility-edge phase with coexisting extended and localized states and to a critical phase that does not originate from IDZ fragmentation, and show that the SIC can cleanly distinguish these scenarios through their distinct steady-state profiles, initial-site sensitivities, and the presence or absence of subregion echoes. Our results demonstrate that the SIC serves as a powerful real-space probe for diagnosing critical phases and uncovering the bottlenecked connectivity that underlies the multifractal structure of critical states.