Magnetic phases of spin-1 lattice gases with random interactions

© 2017 American Physical Society. A spin-1 atomic gas in an optical lattice, in the unit-filling Mott insulator (MI) phase and in the presence of disordered spin-dependent interaction, is considered. In this regime, at zero temperature, the system is well described by a disordered rotationally invariant spin-1 bilinear-biquadratic model. We study, via the density matrix renormalization group algorithm, a bounded disorder model such that the spin interactions can be locally either ferromagnetic or antiferromagnetic. Random interactions induce the appearance of a disordered ferromagnetic phase characterized by a nonvanishing value of the spin glass order parameter across the boundary between a ferromagnetic phase and a dimer phase exhibiting random singlet order. We also study the distribution of the block entanglement entropy in the different regions.