Probing Entanglement in a Many-Body-Localized System

ORAL

Abstract

An interacting quantum system that is subject to disorder may cease to thermalize due to localization of its constituents, thereby marking the breakdown of thermodynamics. The key to our understanding of this phenomenon lies in the system's entanglement, which is experimentally challenging to measure. We realize such a many-body-localized system in a disordered Bose-Hubbard chain and characterize its entanglement properties through particle fluctuations and correlations. We observe that the particles become localized, suppressing transport and preventing the thermalization of subsystems. Notably, we measure the development of non-local correlations, whose evolution is consistent with a logarithmic growth of entanglement entropy - the hallmark of many-body localization. Our work experimentally establishes many-body localization as a qualitatively distinct phenomenon from localization in non-interacting, disordered systems.

*We are supported by grants from the National Science Foundation, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation's EPiQS Initiative, an Air Force Office of Scientific Research MURI program, an Army Research Office MURI program and the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program.

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Presenters

  • Robert Schittko

    • Harvard University

Authors

  • Robert Schittko

    • Harvard University

  • Alexander Lukin

    • Harvard University

  • Matthew Rispoli

    • Harvard University

  • Ming E Tai

    • Harvard University

  • Adam Kaufman

    • JILA, University of Colorado and National Institute of Standards and Technology

  • Soonwon Choi

    • University of California, Berkeley
    • UC Berkeley
    • Physics, University of California Berkeley
    • University of California Berkeley
    • Harvard University
    • Physics, University of California, Berkeley

  • Vedika Khemani

    • Harvard University
    • Physics, Harvard University

  • Julian Leonard

    • Harvard University
    • ETH Zurich

  • Markus Greiner

    • Harvard University
    • Physics Department, Harvard University