title: Purification and many-body localization in cold atomic gases.
abstract: We propose to observe many-body localization in cold atomic gases by realizing a Bose-Hubbard chain with binary disorder and studying its nonequilibrium dynamics. In particular, we show that measuring the difference in occupation between even and odd sites, starting from a prepared density-wave state, provides clear signatures of localization. Furthermore, we confirm as hallmarks of the many-body localized phase a logarithmic increase of the entanglement entropy in time and Poissonian level statistics. Our numerical density-matrix renormalization group calculations for infinite system size are based on a purification approach; this allows us to perform the disorder average exactly, thus producing data without any statistical noise and with maximal simulation times of up to a factor 10 longer than in the clean case.
authors.affiliation: Department of Physics and Research Center OPTIMAS, Technical University Kaiserslautern, D-67663 Kaiserslautern, Germany and Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg R3T 2N2, Canada.
authors.forename: Felix
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Andraschko
authors.affiliation: Institut für Theoretische Physik, Universität Heidelberg, D-69120 Heidelberg, Germany.
authors.forename: Tilman
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Enss
authors.affiliation: Department of Physics and Research Center OPTIMAS, Technical University Kaiserslautern, D-67663 Kaiserslautern, Germany and Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg R3T 2N2, Canada.
authors.forename: Jesko
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Sirker