Progress Toward Realizing the Superfluid to Mott-Insulator Transition in the Presence of Fine-Grain Disorder

We report on experimental progress toward realizing the superfluid to Mott-insulator transition in the presence of fine-grain disorder.~ Disorder is added---using a speckle field created by a holographic diffuser---to a $^{87}$Rb Bose-Einstein condensate trapped in a 3-D optical lattice. We are able to achieve speckle sizes of 700 nm, less than twice the lattice spacing, by employing low f/{\#} optics and 532 nm light.