Site-resolved probing of the superfluid to Bose glass transition in an optical quasicrystal

Quasicrystals are a novel form of condensed matter that is not periodic, but nonetheless long-range ordered. Ultracold atoms in quasiperiodic optical lattices have emerged as a powerful platform for studying the quantum phases of quasicrystals. In this work, we loaded a Bose-Einstein condensate of bosonic potassium into an eight-fold rotationally symmetric optical quasicrystal (8QC) formed by superimposing four retro-reflected optical lattices at 45-degree angles in a plane. We magnified the quantum gas prior to detection and probed the single-site resolved density distributions of the quasicrystal, revealing the aperiodic Ammann-Beenker tiling pattern. Analyzing the density distributions in configuration space with single-site resolution, we identified the superfluid to Bose glass transition. This work paves the way for microscopically assessing relaxation behavior and topological properties in quasicrystals with unprecedented spatial resolution.