Related Experiment Video
Updated: Apr 19, 2026

Cooling an Optically Trapped Ultracold Fermi Gas by Periodical Driving
Published on: March 30, 2017
Purification and many-body localization in cold atomic gases
Felix Andraschko1, Tilman Enss2, Jesko Sirker1
1Department of Physics and Research Center OPTIMAS, Technical University Kaiserslautern, D-67663 Kaiserslautern, Germany and Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg R3T 2N2, Canada.
Abstract:
We propose to observe many-body localization in cold atomic gases by realizing a Bose-Hubbard chain with binary disorder and studying its nonequilibrium dynamics. In particular, we show that measuring the difference in occupation between even and odd sites, starting from a prepared density-wave state, provides clear signatures of localization. Furthermore, we confirm as hallmarks of the many-body localized phase a logarithmic increase of the entanglement entropy in time and Poissonian level statistics. Our numerical density-matrix renormalization group calculations for infinite system size are based on a purification approach; this allows us to perform the disorder average exactly, thus producing data without any statistical noise and with maximal simulation times of up to a factor 10 longer than in the clean case.
Related Concept Videos
Atomic Nuclei: Nuclear Relaxation Processes
The Quantum-Mechanical Model of an Atom
Atomic Nuclei: Nuclear Spin State Population Distribution
Atomic Spectroscopy: Effects of Temperature
At thermal equilibrium, the relative populations of excited and ground state atoms can be estimated using the Maxwell–Boltzmann distribution. For example, an increase in temperature...
Sublimation
Molecular Comparison of Gases, Liquids, and Solids

