Abstract
The disordered Bose–Hubbard model—a paradigm for strongly correlated and disordered bosonic systems1—is central to our understanding of quantum phase transitions2. Despite extensive theoretical work on the disordered Bose–Hubbard model, little is known about the impact of temperature, the dynamical behaviour of quantum phases, and how equilibrium is affected during quantum phase transitions. These issues are critically important to applications such as quantum annealing3,4,5,6,7 and electronics based on quantum phase transitions8. Here, we use a quantum quench of disorder in an ultracold lattice gas to dynamically probe the superfluid–Bose glass quantum phase transition at non-zero temperature ( Fig. 1). By measuring excitations generated during the quench, we provide evidence for superfluid puddles in the Bose glass phase and produce a superfluid–Bose glass phase diagram consistent with completely constrained, finite temperature, and equilibrium quantum Monte Carlo simulations. The residual energy from the quench, which is an efficacy measure for optimization through quantum annealing, is unchanged for quench times spanning nearly a hundred tunnelling times.
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Acknowledgements
The authors acknowledge funding from the National Science Foundation (grants PHY 12-05548 and PHY 15-05468) and the Army Research Office (grant W911NF-12-1-0462). Computation time was provided by XSEDE resources at TACC (Texas) and INCITE resources at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
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B.D., C.M., U.R. and D.M.C. conceived the research. C.M. and U.R. contributed equally to this work: C.M. conducted and analysed the measurements, and U.R. performed and analysed the numerical simulations. P.R. and D.C. contributed to the measurements and data analysis. B.D. and D.M.C. supervised the experimental and theoretical work, respectively. B.D., U.R. and C.M. wrote the manuscript, which was discussed by and commented on by all authors.
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Meldgin, C., Ray, U., Russ, P. et al. Probing the Bose glass–superfluid transition using quantum quenches of disorder. Nature Phys 12, 646–649 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/nphys3695
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nphys3695
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