Controlling disorder with periodically modulated interactions

We investigate the celebrated problem of the one-dimensional tight-binding model in the presence of disorder leading to Anderson localization from a novel perspective. A binary disorder is assumed to be created by immobile, heavy particles that affect the motion of the lighter, mobile species in the limit of no interaction between mobile particles. Fast, periodic modulations of interspecies interactions allow us to produce an effective model with small diagonal and large off-diagonal disorder previously unexplored in cold-atom experiments. We present an expression for an approximate Anderson localization length and verify the existence of the well-known, extended resonant mode. We also analyze the influence of nonzero next-nearest-neighbor hopping terms. We point out that periodic modulation of interaction allows disorder to work as a tunable bandpass filter for momenta.