Our work "Observing the loss and revival of long-range phase coherence through disorder quenches" has been published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS January 4, 2022 119 (1) e2111078118). We have experimentally investigated the relaxation dynamics of a molecular Bose-Einstein condensate of fermionic lithium-6 through disorder quenches. Specifically, we have investigated the change in density and hydrodynamic expansion, which can be attributed to long-range phase coherence. Interestingly, such disorder quenches destroy long-range phase one order of magnitude faster than the density distribution responds to the disorder potential. In contrast, the long-range phase coherence takes two orders of magnitude longer to revive and hence restore its initial properties than the density distribution. A good agreement of the experimental results is shown by a numerical simulation of the Gross-Pitaevskii equation, contributed by our colleague Giuliano Orso from Paris. Our work illustrates the crucial role of long-range phase coherence in the relaxation of quantum many-body systems.
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New publication in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
