Abstract
We explore the impact of weak disorder on the dynamics of classical particles in a periodically oscillating lattice. It is demonstrated that the disorder induces a hopping process from diffusive to regular motion; i.e., we observe the counterintuitive phenomenon that disorder leads to regular behavior. If the disorder is localized in a finite-sized part of the lattice, the described hopping causes initially diffusive particles to even accumulate in regular structures of the corresponding phase space. A hallmark of this accumulation is the emergence of pronounced peaks in the velocity distribution of particles that should be detectable in state of the art experiments, e.g., with cold atoms in optical lattices.
- Received 27 August 2013
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.112.034101
© 2014 American Physical Society