Abstract
Disorder can profoundly affect the transport properties of a wide range of quantum materials. At present, significant disagreement exists regarding features of the disordered Bose- Hubbard model, which is used to study disorder in strongly correlated bosonic systems 1,2 . Here, by measuring transport 3 in a disordered optical lattice4, we discover a disorderinduced superfluid-to-insulator transition in this system, in quantitative agreement with a predicted superfluid-Boseglass transition from recent numerical simulations 5 . Both the superfluid-to-insulator transition and correlated changes in the atomic quasimomentum distribution-which verify a simple model for the interplay of disorder and interactions in this system-are phenomena new to the unit-filling regime explored in this work. We find that increasing disorder strength generically leads to greater dissipation, excluding predictions of a disorder-induced or 're-entrant' superfluid. Whereas the absence of a re-entrant superfluid may be explained by finite temperature, the measured bounds on entropy strongly constrain theory.
Original language | English (US) |
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Pages (from-to) | 677-680 |
Number of pages | 4 |
Journal | Nature Physics |
Volume | 6 |
Issue number | 9 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Sep 2010 |
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- General Physics and Astronomy