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arXiv:0909.0491 · Physical Review Letters

Light Scattering for Thermometry of Fermionic Atoms in an Optical Lattice

Janne Ruostekoski, Christopher J. Foot, Amita B. Deb

Published Oct 23, 2009• 41 citations
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Abstract

We propose a method of using off-resonant light scattering to measure the temperature of fermionic atoms tightly confined in a two-dimensional optical-lattice potential. We show that fluctuations of the intensity in the far-field diffraction pattern arising from thermal correlations of the atoms can be accurately detected above the shot noise by collecting photons scattered in a forward direction, with the diffraction maxima blocked. The sensitivity of this method of thermometry is enhanced by an additional harmonic trapping potential.

DOI
10.1103/physrevlett.103.170404

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We propose a method of using off-resonant light scattering to measure the temperature of fermionic atoms tightly confined in a two-dimensional optical-lattice potential. We show that fluctuations of the intensity in the far-field diffraction pattern arising from thermal correlations of the atoms can be accurately detected above the shot noise by collecting photons scattered in a forward direction, with the diffraction maxima blocked. The sensitivity of this method of thermometry is enhanced by an additional harmonic trapping potential.
Low temperatures are necessary for the observation of strongly correlated quantum phases of fermionic atoms in optical lattices. We analyze how the temperature of a Fermi gas is altered when the fermions are loaded into an optical lattice with an underlying harmonic confining potential, and show how the temperature can be measured. The temperature of the atoms in the optical lattice determines the fraction of doubly occupied lattice sites of a two-component Fermi gas. We analytically calculate this quantity and find a strong temperature dependence. This fraction can be measured by studying the production of molecules in the lattice using a Feshbach resonance, which allows for precise thermometry of atoms in an optical lattice.
We show how off-resonant light scattering can provide quantitative information on antiferromagnetic ordering of a two-species fermionic atomic gas in a tightly-confined two-dimensional optical lattice.We analyze the emerging magnetic ordering of atoms in the mean-field and in random phase approximations and show how the many-body static and dynamic correlations, evaluated in the standard Feynman-Dyson perturbation series, can be detected in the scattered light signal.The staggered magnetization reveals itself in the magnetic Bragg peaks of the individual spin components.These magnetic peaks, however, can be considerably suppressed in the absence of a true long-range antiferromagnetic order.The light scattered outside the diffraction orders can be collected by a lens with highly improved signal-to-shot-noise ratio when the diffraction maxima are blocked.The collective and single-particle excitations are identified in the spectrum of the scattered light.We find that the spin-conserving and spin-exchanging atomic transitions convey information on density, longitudinal spin, and transverse spin correlations.The different correlations and scattering processes exhibit characteristic angular distribution profiles for the scattered light, and e.g., the diagnostic signal of transverse spin correlations could be separated from the optical response by the scattering direction, frequency, or polarization.We also analyze the detection accuracy by estimating the number of required measurements, constrained by the heating rate that is determined by inelastic light-scattering events.The imaging technique could be extended to the two-species fermionic states in other regions of the phase diagram where the ground-state properties are still not fully understood.
A method is proposed to directly measure the temperature of a gas of weakly interacting fermionic atoms loaded into an optical lattice. This technique relies on Raman spectroscopy and is applicable to experimentally relevant temperature regimes. Additionally, a similar spectroscopy scheme can be used to obtain information on the quasiparticle properties and Hubbard bands of the metallic and Mott-insulating states of interacting fermionic spin mixtures. These two methods provide experimentalists with probes to accurately characterize fermionic quantum gases confined to optical lattices.
Different quantum states of atoms in optical lattices can be nondestructively monitored by off-resonant collective light scattering into a cavity. Angle resolved measurements of photon number and variance give information about atom-number fluctuations and pair correlations without single-site access. Observation at angles of diffraction minima provides information on quantum fluctuations insensitive to classical noise. For transverse probing, no photon is scattered into a cavity from a Mott insulator phase, while the photon number is proportional to the atom number for a superfluid.
We study off-resonant collective light scattering from ultracold atoms trapped in an optical lattice. Scattering from different atomic quantum states creates different quantum states of the scattered light, which can be distinguished by measurements of the spatial intensity distribution, quadrature variances, photon statistics, or spectral measurements. In particular, angle-resolved intensity measurements reflect global statistics of atoms (total number of radiating atoms) as well as local statistical quantities (single-site statistics even without optical access to a single site) and pair correlations between different sites. As a striking example we consider scattering from transversally illuminated atoms into an optical cavity mode. For the Mott-insulator state, similar to classical diffraction, the number of photons scattered into a cavity is zero due to destructive interference, while for the superfluid state it is nonzero and proportional to the number of atoms. Moreover, we demonstrate that light scattering into a standing-wave cavity has a nontrivial angle dependence, including the appearance of narrow features at angles, where classical diffraction predicts zero. The measurement procedure corresponds to the quantum nondemolition measurement of various atomic variables by observing light.
We study the scattering of a weak and far-detuned light from a system of ultracold bosons in one-dimensional and three-dimensional optical lattices. We show the connection between angular distributions of the scattered light and statistical properties of a Bose gas in a periodic potential. The angular patterns are determined by the Fourier transform of the second-order correlation function, and thus they can be used to retrieve information on particle number fluctuations and correlations. We consider superfluid and Mott-insulator phases of the Bose gas in a lattice and we analyze in detail how the scattering depends on the system dimensionality, temperature, and atom-atom interactions.