Observing the two-dimensional Bose glass in an optical quasicrystal.

Abstract

The presence of disorder substantially influences the behaviour of physical systems. It can give rise to slow or glassy dynamics, or to a complete suppression of transport as in Anderson insulators¹, where normally extended wavefunctions such as light fields or electronic Bloch waves become exponentially localized. The combined effect of disorder and interactions is central to the richness of condensed-matter physics². In bosonic systems, it can also lead to additional quantum states such as the Bose glass^3,4-an insulating but compressible state without long-range phase coherence that emerges in disordered bosonic systems and is distinct from the well-known superfluid and Mott insulating ground states of interacting bosons. Here we report the experimental realization of the two-dimensional Bose glass using ultracold atoms in an eight-fold symmetric quasicrystalline optical lattice⁵. By probing the coherence properties of the system, we observe a Bose-glass-to-superfluid transition and map out the phase diagram in the weakly interacting regime. We furthermore demonstrate that it is not possible to adiabatically traverse the Bose glass on typical experimental timescales by examining the capability to restore coherence and discuss the connection to the expected non-ergodicity of the Bose glass. Our observations are in good agreement with recent quantum Monte Carlo predictions⁶ and pave the way for experimentally testing the connection between the Bose glass, many-body localization and glassy dynamics more generally^7,8.