Localization landscape for interacting Bose gases in one-dimensional speckle potentials

Abstract

While the properties and the shape of the ground state of a gas of ultracold bosons are well understood in harmonic potentials, they remain for a large part unknown in the case of random potentials. Here we use localization-landscape (LL) theory to study the properties of the solutions to the Gross-Pitaevskii equation (GPE) in one-dimensional (1D) speckle potentials. In the cases of attractive interactions, we find that the LL allows one to predict the position of the localization center of the ground state (GS) of the GPE. For weakly repulsive interactions, we point out that the GS of the quasi-1D GPE can be understood as a superposition of a finite number of single-particle states, which can be computed by exploiting the LL. For intermediate repulsive interactions, we introduce a Thomas-Fermi-like approach for the GS which holds in the smoothing regime, well beyond the usual approximation involving the original potential. Moreover, we show that, in the Lifshitz glass regime, the particle density and the chemical potential can be well estimated by the LL. Our approach can be applied to any positive-valued random potential endowed with finite-range correlations and can be generalized to higher-dimensional systems.