Signature of Many-Body Localization of Phonons in Strongly Disordered Superlattices
Name
2008.02257.pdf
Description
Submitted version
Size
2.17 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
bb7a485fd69dd4dea91d72180a7da975
Author(s)
Nguyen, Thanh
Andrejevic, Nina
Po, Hoi Chun
Song, Qichen
Tsurimaki, Yoichiro
Drucker, Nathan C
Alatas, Ahmet
Alp, Esen E
Leu, Bogdan M
Cunsolo, Alessandro
Date Issued
September 8, 2021
Journal
Nano Letters
Publisher
American Chemical Society (ACS)
Version
Original manuscript
Abstract
Many-body localization (MBL) has attracted significant attention because of its immunity to thermalization, role in logarithmic entanglement entropy growth, and opportunities to reach exotic quantum orders. However, experimental realization of MBL in solid-state systems has remained challenging. Here, we report evidence of a possible phonon MBL phase in disordered GaAs/AlAs superlattices. Through grazing-incidence inelastic X-ray scattering, we observe a strong deviation of the phonon population from equilibrium in samples doped with ErAs nanodots at low temperature, signaling a departure from thermalization. This behavior occurs within finite phonon energy and wavevector windows, suggesting a localization-thermalization crossover. We support our observation by proposing a theoretical model for the effective phonon Hamiltonian in disordered superlattices, and showing that it can be mapped exactly to a disordered 1D Bose-Hubbard model with a known MBL phase. Our work provides momentum-resolved experimental evidence of phonon localization, extending the scope of MBL to disordered solid-state systems.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Physics
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Mechanical Engineering
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.nanolett.1c01905
