Realization and Detection of Nonergodic Critical Phases in an Optical Raman Lattice

The critical phases, being delocalized but non-ergodic, are fundamental phases which are different from both the many-body localization and ergodic extended quantum phases, and have so far not been realized in experiment. Here we propose to realize such critical phases with and without interaction based on a topological optical Raman lattice scheme, which possesses one-dimensional spin-orbit coupling and an incommensurate Zeeman potential. We demonstrate the existence of both the noninteracting and many-body critical phases, which can coexist with the topological phase, and show that the critical-localization transition coincides with the topological phase boundary in noninteracting regime. The dynamical detection of the critical phases is proposed and studied in detail. Finally, we demonstrate how the proposed critical phases can be achieved based on the current cold atom experiments. This work paves the way to observe the novel critical phases.
Comment: 5 pages (4 figures) + Supplementary Material (6 figures). Discussions are updated