Interaction-enabled metal-insulator phase transition in a driven quantum gas

Camilo Cantillano; Karthick Ramanathan; Zekai Chen; Ang Yang; Emilio Aguilera-Valdes; Lei Ying; Manuele Landini; Hanns-Christoph Nägerl; Yanliang Guo

arXiv · 2605.22449

Interaction-enabled metal-insulator phase transition in a driven quantum gas

Camilo Cantillano·Karthick Ramanathan·Zekai Chen·Ang Yang·Emilio Aguilera-Valdes·Lei Ying·Manuele Landini·Hanns-Christoph Nägerl·Yanliang Guo

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Abstract

Particle transport and energy flow are central to a wide range of phenomena in the natural sciences. While interactions generically promote ergodicity and diffusion, quantum interference can arrest transport, defying classical expectations. Here, we experimentally investigate their interplay in a periodically driven 3D quantum gas with tunable interactions. Strikingly, we find a sharp dynamical boundary separating localization from diffusive energy absorption. By tuning the driving amplitude and interaction strength, we map the localization-delocalization phase diagram and characterize this boundary via finite-time scaling. On the insulating side, we observe many-body dynamical localization (MBDL) featuring arrested momentum-space transport. Transport becomes subdiffusive near the boundary and diffusive in the delocalized regime, yielding a metal-insulator transition that we interpret as localization in many-body Hilbert space. Our results exemplify an interaction-enabled dynamical phase transition in a closed Floquet many-body system, and clarify how coherence and interactions jointly govern the quantum-to-classical transition.

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Camilo Cantillano, Karthick Ramanathan, Zekai Chen, Ang Yang, Emilio Aguilera-Valdes, Lei Ying, Manuele Landini, Hanns-Christoph Nägerl, Yanliang Guo. 2026-05-21. Interaction-enabled metal-insulator phase transition in a driven quantum gas. https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.22449

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