Spectral description of the dynamics of ultracold interacting bosons in disordered lattices

Abstract

We study the dynamics of a nonlinear one-dimensional disordered system from a spectral point of view. The spectral entropy and the Lyapunov exponent are extracted from the short-time dynamics, and are shown to give a pertinent characterization of the different dynamical regimes. The chaotic and self-trapped regimes are governed by log-normal laws whose origin is traced to the exponential shape of the eigenstates of the linear problem. These quantities satisfy scaling laws depending on the initial state and explain the system's behaviour at longer times.