Interference in the matter

Hui Deng, Y. Yamamoto

We investigate the quantum interference effects in two types of matter-wave mixing experiments: one with initial matter waves prepared in independent Fock states (type I) and the other with each individual particle prepared in a same coherent superposition of states (type II). In the type I experiment, a symmetric wavefunction of bosons leads to constructive quantum interference and shows final state stimulation, while an anti-symmetric wavefunction of fermions results in destructive quantum interference and inhibited matter wave mixing. In the type II experiment, a coherent superposition state leads to constructive quantum interference and enhanced matter wave mixing for both bosons and fermions, independent of their quantum statistics.

Román Castañeda

The wave superposition is considered the phenomenological principle of light interference, as well as an accurate procedure to calculate the quantum probability of the buildup of single matter particle interference patterns.However, it cannot provide a unified phenomenological framework to explain both types of interference.In this paper, a unified framework is proposed which leads to a unique principle for interference of both light waves and single matter particles.It is shown that the term interference denotes the confinement of the light irradiance or the single matter particles in spatially structured Lorentzian wells, due to the geometric potential determined by the prepared non-locality at the mask plane.This new description does not resort to the assumption of wave superposition, so that the setup configuration plays the main role.

Tim Freegarde

Xuguang Yue, Shujuan Liu, Biao Wu +1 more

Ultra-cold atomic gases provide a new chance to study the universal critical behavior of phase transition. We study theoretically the matter wave interference for ultra-cold Bose gases in the critical regime. We demonstrate that the interference in the momentum distribution can be used to extract the correlation in the Bose gas. A simple relation between the interference visibility and the correlation length is found and used to interpret the pioneering experiment about the critical behavior of dilute Bose gases [Science 315 1556 (2007)]. Our theory paves the way to experimentally study various types of ultra-cold atomic gases with the means of matter wave interference.