Many-body dynamics of dipolar molecules in an optical lattice

Abstract

Understanding the many-body dynamics of isolated quantum systems is one of the central challenges in modern physics. To this end, the direct experimental realization of strongly correlated quantum systems allows one to gain insights into the emergence of complex phenomena. Such insights enable the development of theoretical tools that broaden our understanding. Here, we theoretically model and experimentally probe with Ramsey spectroscopy the quantum dynamics of disordered, dipolar-interacting, ultracold molecules in a partially filled optical lattice. We report the capability to control the dipolar interaction strength, and we demonstrate that the many-body dynamics extends well beyond a nearest-neighbor or mean-field picture, and cannot be quantitatively described using previously available theoretical tools. We develop a novel cluster expansion technique and demonstrate that our theoretical method accurately captures the measured dependence of the spin dynamics on molecule number and on the dipolar interaction strength. In the spirit of quantum simulation, this agreement simultaneously benchmarks the new theoretical method and verifies our microscopic understanding of the experiment. Our findings pave the way for numerous applications in quantum information science, metrology, and condensed matter physics.