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.

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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