Elastic Scattering Time of Matter Waves in Disordered Potentials

We report on an extensive study of the elastic scattering time τ_{s} of matter waves in optical disordered potentials. Using direct experimental measurements, numerical simulations, and comparison with the first-order Born approximation based on the knowledge of the disorder properties, we explore the behavior of τ_{s} over more than 3 orders of magnitude, ranging from the weak to the strong scattering regime. We study in detail the location of the crossover and, as a main result, we reveal the strong influence of the disorder statistics, especially on the relevance of the widely used Ioffe-Regel-like criterion kl_{s}∼1. While it is found to be relevant for Gaussian-distributed disordered potentials, we observe significant deviations for laser speckle disorders that are commonly used with ultracold atoms. Our results are crucial for connecting experimental investigation of complex transport phenomena, such as Anderson localization, to microscopic theories.