Prethermal Dynamical Localization and the Emergence of Chaos in a Kicked Interacting Quantum Gas

While ergodicity is a fundamental postulate of statistical mechanics and implies that driven interacting systems inevitably heat, ergodic dynamics can be disrupted by quantum interference. Despite a quarter-century of experimental studies, the effect of many-body interactions on the resulting dynamically localized state has remained unexplored. We report the experimental realization of a tunably-interacting kicked quantum rotor ensemble using a Bose-Einstein condensate in a pulsed optical lattice. We observe a prethermal localized plateau, which survives for hundreds of kicks, followed by interaction-induced anomalous diffusion. Echo-type time reversal experiments establish the role of interactions in destroying reversibility, and a mapping to kicked spin models illustrates connections to many-body dynamical localization in spin chains. These results demonstrate a dynamical transition to many-body quantum chaos, and illuminate and delimit possibilities for globally protecting quantum information in interacting driven quantum systems.