Testing the universality of the many-body metal-insulator transition by time evolution of a disordered one-dimensional ultracold fermionic gas

Abstract

It is now possible to study experimentally the combined effect of disorder and interactions in cold atom physics. Motivated by these developments we investigate the dynamics around the metal-insulator transition (MIT) in a one-dimensional (1D) Fermi gas with short-range interactions in a quasiperiodic potential by the time-dependent density-matrix renormalization group (tDMRG) technique. By tuning disorder and interactions we study the MIT from the weakly to the strongly interacting limit. The MIT is not universal as time evolution, well described by a process of anomalous diffusion, depends qualitatively on the interaction strength. By using scaling ideas we relate the parameter that controls the diffusion process with the critical exponent that describes the divergence of the localization length. In the limit of strong interactions theoretical arguments suggest that the motion at the MIT tends to ballistic and critical exponents approach mean-field predictions.