Ultracold bosons in optical quasicrystals

Ultracold atoms in optical lattices provide an ideal medium for studies of interacting lattice physics, thanks to their flexible, clean and widely tunable nature. As such, applying this medium to the investigation of quasiperiodic systems, and the rich physics associated with them, presents a promising avenue to probing a range of physical phenomena, not least those related to localization. This poster presents an overview on our recent experiments studying such systems, in which we load ultracold bosons to both an eight-fold rotationally symmetric 2D optical quasicrystal, and a 2D Aubry-Andre lattice, observing signatures of superfluid, Bose glass, and Mott insulator phases and mapping out phase diagrams of both systems with variable interaction strength. We furthermore study the dynamics in the quasicrystal, looking into both sudden quenches between the superfluid and Bose glass regimes, as well as the transport properties of the system and discuss how the results relate to both the underlying system and localization phenomena. We also built a quantum gas magnifier enabling us to probe the quasicrystals at the single site level.