We provide evidence that a clean kicked Bose-Hubbard model exhibits a many-body dynamically localized phase. This phase shows ergodicity breaking up to the largest sizes we were able to consider. We argue that this property persists in the limit of large size. The Floquet states violate eigenstate thermalization and then the asymptotic value of local observables depends on the initial state and is not thermal. This implies that the system does not generically heat up to infinite temperature, for almost all the initial states. Differently from many-body localization here the entanglement entropy linearly increases in time. This increase corresponds to space-delocalized Floquet states which are nevertheless localized across specific subsectors of the Hilbert space: In this way the system is prevented from randomly exploring all the Hilbert space and does not thermalize.
While ergodicity is a fundamental postulate of statistical mechanics and implies that driven interacting systems inevitably heat, ergodic dynamics can be disrupted by quantum interference. Despite a quarter-century of experimental studies, the effect of many-body interactions on the resulting dynamically localized state has remained unexplored. We report the experimental realization of a tunably-interacting kicked quantum rotor ensemble using a Bose-Einstein condensate in a pulsed optical lattice. We observe a prethermal localized plateau, which survives for hundreds of kicks, followed by interaction-induced anomalous diffusion. Echo-type time reversal experiments establish the role of interactions in destroying reversibility, and a mapping to kicked spin models illustrates connections to many-body dynamical localization in spin chains. These results demonstrate a dynamical transition to many-body quantum chaos, and illuminate and delimit possibilities for globally protecting quantum information in interacting driven quantum systems.
The kicked rotor system is a textbook example of how classical and quantum dynamics can drastically differ. The energy of a classical particle confined to a ring and kicked periodically will increase linearly in time whereas in the quantum version the energy saturates after a finite number of kicks. The quantum system undergoes Anderson localization in the angular-momentum space. Conventional wisdom says that in a many-particle system with short-range interactions the localization will be destroyed due to the coupling of widely separated momentum states. Here we provide evidence that for an interacting one-dimensional Bose gas, the Lieb-Linger model, the dynamical localization can persist.
We study the decay mechanism of the gapped lowest-lying excitation of a quasi-pure box-trapped atomic Bose-Einstein condensate. Owing to the absence of lower-energy modes, or direct coupling to an external bath, this excitation is protected against one-body (linear) decay and the damping mechanism is exclusively nonlinear. We develop a universal theoretical model that explains this fundamental nonlinear damping as a process whereby two quanta of the gapped lowest excitation mode couple to a higher-energy mode, which subsequently decays into a continuum. We find quantitative agreement between our experiments and the predictions of this model. Finally, by strongly driving the system below its (lowest) resonant frequency we observe third-harmonic generation, a hallmark of nonlinear behavior.
Periodic driving has emerged as a powerful tool in the quest to engineer new and exotic quantum phases. While driven many-body systems are generically expected to absorb energy indefinitely and reach an infinite-temperature state, the rate of heating can be exponentially suppressed when the drive frequency is large compared to the local energy scales of the system -- leading to long-lived prethermal regimes. In this work, we experimentally study a bosonic cloud of ultracold atoms in a driven optical lattice and identify such a prethermal regime in the Bose-Hubbard model. By measuring the energy absorption of the cloud as the driving frequency is increased, we observe an exponential-in-frequency reduction of the heating rate persisting over more than 2 orders of magnitude. The tunability of the lattice potentials allows us to explore one- and two-dimensional systems in a range of different interacting regimes. Alongside the exponential decrease, the dependence of the heating rate on the frequency displays features characteristic of the phase diagram of the Bose-Hubbard model, whose understanding is additionally supported by numerical simulations in one dimension. Our results show experimental evidence of the phenomenon of Floquet prethermalization, and provide insight into the characterization of heating for driven bosonic systems.
Contrary to a driven classical system that exhibits chaos phenomena and diffusive energy growth, a driven quantum system can exhibit dynamical localization that features energy saturation. However, the evolution of the dynamically localized state in the presence of many-body interactions has for long remained an open question. Here we realize a many-body quantum kicked rotor with a 1D ultracold gas periodically kicked by a pulsed optical lattice, and observe the interaction-driven emergence of dynamical delocalization. The dynamics feature a sub-diffusive energy growth which is manifest over a broad parameter range of interaction strengths and kick strengths. This observed onset of many-body quantum chaos and its characterization by the accompanying theoretical modeling introduce new tools to study many-body localization-delocalization phenomena in the synthetic momentum space.