TY - JOUR T1 - Many-body dynamics of dipolar molecules in an optical lattice JF - Physical Review Letters Y1 - 2014 A1 - Kaden R. A. Hazzard A1 - Bryce Gadway A1 - Michael Foss-Feig A1 - Bo Yan A1 - Steven A. Moses A1 - Jacob P. Covey A1 - Norman Y. Yao A1 - Mikhail D. Lukin A1 - Jun Ye A1 - Deborah S. Jin A1 - Ana Maria Rey AB - Understanding the many-body dynamics of isolated quantum systems is one of the central challenges in modern physics. To this end, the direct experimental realization of strongly correlated quantum systems allows one to gain insights into the emergence of complex phenomena. Such insights enable the development of theoretical tools that broaden our understanding. Here, we theoretically model and experimentally probe with Ramsey spectroscopy the quantum dynamics of disordered, dipolar-interacting, ultracold molecules in a partially filled optical lattice. We report the capability to control the dipolar interaction strength, and we demonstrate that the many-body dynamics extends well beyond a nearest-neighbor or mean-field picture, and cannot be quantitatively described using previously available theoretical tools. We develop a novel cluster expansion technique and demonstrate that our theoretical method accurately captures the measured dependence of the spin dynamics on molecule number and on the dipolar interaction strength. In the spirit of quantum simulation, this agreement simultaneously benchmarks the new theoretical method and verifies our microscopic understanding of the experiment. Our findings pave the way for numerous applications in quantum information science, metrology, and condensed matter physics. VL - 113 UR - http://arxiv.org/abs/1402.2354v1 CP - 19 J1 - Phys. Rev. Lett. U5 - 10.1103/PhysRevLett.113.195302 ER -