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arXiv:1004.2384

The Hanbury Brown Twiss effect for atomic matter waves

Christoph Ira Westbrook, Denis Boiron

Published Apr 14, 2010• 1 citation
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

This paper discusses our recent work on developing the matter wave analogs to the Hanbury Brown Twiss experiment. We discuss experiments using cold atoms, both bosons and fermions, both coherent and incoherent. Simple concepts from classical and quantum optics suffice to understand most of the results, but the ideas can also be traced back to the work of Einstein on the thermodynamics of Bose gases.

DOI
10.48550/arxiv.1004.2384

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This paper discusses our recent work on developing the matter wave analogs to the Hanbury Brown Twiss experiment. We discuss experiments using cold atoms, both bosons and fermions, both coherent and incoherent. Simple concepts from classical and quantum optics suffice to understand most of the results, but the ideas can also be traced back to the work of Einstein on the thermodynamics of Bose gases.
In spite of the predilections of the authors, the work of Hanbury Brown and Twiss on intensity interferometry may have had a more powerful impact on quantum optics than on astronomy. That it could have such an impact on quantum optics is even more surprising when one considers that the their results are more easily explained in the context of classical optics than quantum optics. Nevertheless for more than 50 years, quantum optics has been inspired by intensity interferometry and continues to add new variations and insights. I will discuss experiments using cold atoms, both bosons and fermions, and from sources both coherent and incoherent. The observations yield useful information concerning what happens in atomic systems both when they interact with each other and when they interact with light.
In the 1950s, Hanbury Brown and Twiss developed a novel way to measure the size of stars by studying the coherence of the light they emit. These intensity correlations, at the time obtained from an incoherent thermal source of radiation, were the source of confusion at first but ended up initiating an entire new field of physics: the discipline of quantum optics. In his Perspective, [Knight][1] discusses results reported in the same issue by [ Schellekens et al. ][2] in which these same correlation effects have been seen in cold atomic gases, giving rise to intensity correlations of matter waves. The findings suggest a host of new opportunities in this field of quantum atom optics. [1]: http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/310/5748/631 [2]: http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/short/310/5748/648
The second quantum revolution is based on the concept of entanglement and the ability to observe and manipulate individual quantum objects. This notion was prompted by celebrated quantum optics landmark experiments. The author’s group has endeavored to revisit these experiments with atoms instead of photons, more precisely metastable helium atoms (He*), which can be detected one by one, as photons. The first landmark that announced the beginning of modern quantum optics was the Hanbury Brown and Twiss effect: it has been studied not only with 4He* atoms, which are bosons, but also with 3He* atoms, which are fermions. The group has then observed the atomic Hong Ou and Mandel effect, and, more recently, shown the possibility to use a slightly generalized scheme to test Bell’s inequalities with atoms entangled in momentum.
In this lecture, I first present my views on the second vs the first quantum revolution, then describe the Hanbury Brown and Twiss effect with photons, and indicate why it was so important in the development of modern quantum optics. The presentation of our experiments on the HBT effect with atoms will allow me to emphasize the analogies but also the increased richness of the effect when going from photons to atoms. I will similarly describe the HOM effect for photons and its significance, and then present the analogous experiment with atoms. In conclusion, I will put these two effects in the long list of landmarks in the development of quantum optics, and indicate what has been done and what remains to be done with atoms in lieu of photons.
The Hanbury Brown-Twiss effect is one of the celebrated phenomenologies of modern physics that accommodates equally well classical (interferences of waves) and quantum (correlations between indistinguishable particles) interpretations. The effect was discovered in the late thirties with a basic observation of Hanbury Brown that radio-pulses from two distinct antennas generate signals on the oscilloscope that wiggle similarly to the naked eye. When Hanbury Brown and his mathematician colleague Twiss took the obvious step to propose bringing the effect in the optical range, they met with considerable opposition as single-photon interferences were deemed impossible. The Hanbury Brown-Twiss effect is nowadays universally accepted and, being so fundamental, embodies many subtleties of our understanding of the wave/particle dual nature of light. Thanks to a novel experimental technique, we report here a generalized version of the Hanbury Brown-Twiss effect to include the frequency of the detected light, or, from the particle point of view, the energy of the detected photons. Our source of light is a polariton condensate, that allows high-resolution filtering of a spectrally broad source with a high degree of coherence. In addition to the known tendencies of indistinguishable photons to arrive together on the detector, we find that photons of different colors present the opposite characteristic of avoiding each others. We postulate that fermions can be similarly brought to exhibit positive (boson-like) correlations by frequency filtering.