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Nature Communications

Observation of quantum criticality of a four-dimensional phase transition

Farid Madani, Maxime Denis, Pascal Szriftgiser, Jean Claude Garreau, Adam Rançon, Radu Chicireanu

Published Mar 13, 2025• 6 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Understanding how a system's behavior extrapolates beyond 3D is a fundamental question in physics, spanning topics from unification theories to critical phenomena. In statistical physics, fluctuations' strength is highly sensitive to dimensionality, affecting phase transitions. In low dimensions, phase transitions are suppressed, while high-dimensional systems exhibit simpler mean-field behavior. In some cases, like the Anderson localization-delocalization transition in disordered media, criticality remains non-trivial even in dimensions larger than three, presenting challenges to existing frameworks. In this work, using a periodically-driven ultracold atomic gas to engineer disorder and synthetic dimensions, we experimentally observe a phase transition between localized and delocalized phases. The results display three key features of the 4D transition: 1) observables follow d=4 critical scale invariance, 2) critical exponents match numerical predictions for the 4D Anderson transition, and 3) they agree with Wegner's relation in 4D. These findings provide a new avenue for exploring complex critical phenomena in higher dimensions.

DOI
10.1038/s41467-025-57396-3

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Understanding how a system's behavior extrapolates beyond 3D is a fundamental question in physics, spanning topics from unification theories to critical phenomena. In statistical physics, fluctuations' strength is highly sensitive to dimensionality, affecting phase transitions. In low dimensions, phase transitions are suppressed, while high-dimensional systems exhibit simpler mean-field behavior. In some cases, like the Anderson localization-delocalization transition in disordered media, criticality remains non-trivial even in dimensions larger than three, presenting challenges to existing frameworks. In this work, using a periodically-driven ultracold atomic gas to engineer disorder and synthetic dimensions, we experimentally observe a phase transition between localized and delocalized phases. The results display three key features of the 4D transition: 1) observables follow d=4 critical scale invariance, 2) critical exponents match numerical predictions for the 4D Anderson transition, and 3) they agree with Wegner's relation in 4D. These findings provide a new avenue for exploring complex critical phenomena in higher dimensions.
Phase transitions are prevalent throughout physics, spanning thermal phenomena like water boiling to magnetic transitions in solids. They encompass cosmological phase transitions in the early universe and the transition into a quark-gluon plasma in high-energy collisions. Quantum phase transitions, particularly intriguing, occur at temperatures near absolute zero and are driven by quantum fluctuations rather than thermal ones. The strength of the fluctuations is very sensitive to the dimensionality of the physical systems, which determines the existence and nature of phase transitions. Low-dimensional systems often exhibit suppression of phase transitions, while high-dimensional systems tend to exhibit mean-field-like behavior. The localization-delocalization Anderson transition stands out among quantum phase transitions, as it is thought to retain its non-mean-field character across all dimensions. This work marks the first observation and characterization of the Anderson transition in four dimensions using ultracold atoms as a quantum simulator with synthetic dimensions. We characterize the universal dynamics in the vicinity of the phase transition. We measure the critical exponents describing the scale-invariant properties of the critical dynamics, which are shown to obey Wegner's scaling law. Our work is the first experimental demonstration that the Anderson transition is not mean-field in dimension four.
Anderson localization is fundamentally controlled by dimensionality, yet the nature of the Anderson transition in continuously tunable noninteger dimensions remains largely unexplored. Here, we introduce a family of three-dimensional fractal lattices with continuously tunable spectral dimension ds∈[2,3]d_s\in[2,3]ds​∈[2,3], providing a controlled platform for studying localization physics beyond integer dimensions and across the lower critical dimension ds=2d_s=2ds​=2. Using large-scale finite-size scaling analysis, we systematically investigate the Anderson transition and identify mobility edges throughout the fractal family. The critical disorder strength evolves continuously from 000 to 16.616.616.6 as the spectral dimension increases from 222 to 333. We show that the spectral dimension predominantly governs the universality class of the transition, while the precise critical point is additionally influenced by microscopic geometric details of the underlying fractal lattice. The critical exponent exhibits an approximate inverse dependence on dsd_sds​, providing quantitative insight into scaling theory in noninteger dimensions. Our results establish tunable fractal lattices as a versatile framework for exploring localization and quantum critical phenomena beyond conventional integer-dimensional systems.
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.
Uncovering and understanding universal dynamics in matter far from equilibrium remains a key challenge. In this work, we identify a so far unrecognized form of universal behavior that emerges after a sudden symmetry-breaking quench at continuous phase transitions. Our key observation is that the order-parameter fluctuations in Ising models exhibit a compelling temporal collapse across a wide range of system sizes and quench strengths, indicative of an emergent single-variable scaling form. This phenomenon can be explained by introducing a so far unknown dynamical critical exponent for the underlying continuous phase transition. We find evidence for a lower critical effective dimension of this universal regime: it is observed in the 2D quantum and 3D and 4D classical Ising models, but not in the 1D quantum or 2D classical cases. Our results suggest that our observed universal far-from-equilibrium scaling may extend beyond the Ising models studied here and could more broadly characterize systems with non-conserved order parameters, opening new avenues for exploring universal dynamics both theoretically and in current experimental platforms.
Anderson localization of waves in disordered media was originally predicted[1] fifty years ago, in the context of transport of electrons in crystals[2]. The phenomenon is much more general[3] and has been observed in a variety of systems, including light waves[4, 5]. However, Anderson localization has not been observed directly for matter waves. Owing to the high degree of control over most of the system parameters (in particular the interaction strength), ultracold atoms offer opportunities for the study of disorder-induced localization[6]. Here we use a non-interacting Bose-Einstein condensate to study Anderson localization. The experiment is performed with a one-dimensional quasi-periodic lattice - a system that features a crossover between extended and exponentially localized states, as in the case of purely random disorder in higher dimensions. Localization is clearly demonstrated through investigations of the transport properties and spatial and momentum distributions. We characterize the crossover, finding that the critical disorder strength scales with the tunnelling energy of the atoms in the lattice. This controllable system may be used to investigate the interplay of disorder and interaction (ref. 7 and references therein), and to explore exotic quantum phases[8, 9].
Characterizing the delocalization transition in closed quantum systems with a many-body localized phase is a key open question in the field of nonequilibrium physics. We exploit the fact that localization of particles as realized in Anderson localization and standard many-body localization (MBL) implies Fock-space localization in single-particle basis sets characterized by a real-space index. Using a recently introduced quantitative measure for Fock-space localization computed from the density distributions, the occupation distance, we systematically study its scaling behavior across delocalization transitions and identify critical points from scaling collapses of numerical data. Excellent agreement with literature results is found for the critical disorder strengths of noninteracting fermions, such as the one-dimensional Aubry-Andr\'e model and the three-dimensional Anderson model. We observe a distinctively different scaling behavior in the case of interacting fermions with random disorder consistent with a Kosterlitz-Thouless transition. Finally, we use our measure to extract the transition point as a function of filling for interacting fermions.