We propose to utilize density-density correlations in the image of an expanding gas cloud to probe complex many-body states of trapped ultracold atoms. In particular, we show how this technique can be used to detect superfluidity of fermionic gases and to study spin correlations of multicomponent atoms in optical lattices. The feasibility of the method is investigated by analysis of the relevant signal to noise ratio including experimental imperfections.
We propose to utilize density-density correlations in the image of an expanding gas cloud to probe complex many-body states of trapped ultracold atoms. In particular, we show how this technique can be used to detect superfluidity of fermionic gases and to study spin correlations of multicomponent atoms in optical lattices. The feasibility of the method is investigated by analysis of the relevant signal to noise ratio including experimental imperfections.
We present a numerical study of noise correlations, i.e., density-density correlations in momentum space, in the extended fermionic Hubbard model in one dimension. In experiments with ultracold atoms, these noise correlations can be extracted from time-of-flight images of the expanding cloud. Using the density-matrix renormalization group method to investigate the Hubbard model at various fillings and interactions, we confirm that the noise correlations contain full information on the most important fluctuations present in the system. We point out the importance of the sum rules fulfilled by the noise correlations and show that they yield nonsingular structures beyond the predictions of bosonization approaches. Noise correlations can thus serve as a universal probe of order and can be used to characterize the many-body states of cold atoms in optical lattices.
Ultracold atoms in optical lattices provide an extremely clean and controllable setting to explore quantum many-body phases of matter. Here we give a brief review of the strong-correlation physics that has been realized using such ultracold atoms in optical lattices ranging from the realization of Hubbard models to studies of quantum magnetism and the detection of single atoms with lattice site resolution. All this has opened up fundamentally new opportunities for the investigation of quantum many-body systems. Introduction Over the past years, ultracold atoms in optical lattices have emerged as versatile new systems to explore the physics of quantum many-body systems. On the one hand, they can be helpful in gaining a better understanding of known phases of matter and their dynamical behavior; on the other hand, they allow one to realize completely novel quantum systems that have not been studied before in nature [1, 2, 3]. Commonly, the approach of exploring quantum many-body systems in such a way is referred to as “quantum simulations.” Examples of some of the first strongly interacting many-body phases that have been realized both in lattices and in the continuum include the quantum phase transition from a superfluid to a Mott insulator [4, 5, 6], fermionic Mott insulators [7, 8], the achievement of a Tonks- Girardeau gas [9, 10], and the realization of the Bose-Einsten condensate (BEC)– Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer (BCS) crossover (see also Chapter 12) in Fermi gas mixture [11] using Feshbach resonances [12]. In almost all of these experiments, detection was limited to time-of-flight imaging or more refined derived techniques that mainly characterized the momentum distribution of the quantum gas [2]. For several years, researchers in the field have therefore aspired to employ in situ single-particle detection methods for the analysis of ultracold quantum gases. Only recently has it become possible to implement such imaging techniques, marking a milestone for the characterization and manipulation of ultracold quantum gases [13, 14, 15, 16, 17]. In our discussion, we will focus on one of the most successful of these techniques based on high-resolution fluorescence imaging. Despite being a rather new technique, such quantum gas microscopy has already proven to be an enabling technology for probing and manipulating quantum many-body systems. For the first time, controllable and strongly interacting many-body systems, as realized with ultracold atoms, could be observed on a local scale [17, 16].
Ultracold bosonic and fermionic quantum gases in optical lattices can be used as versatile model systems for the investigation of fundamental condensed matter physics hamiltonians. We report on two novel detection techniques, which have allowed us to reveal e.g. the in trap density profile of strongly correlated bosonic quantum gases in the lattice. Thereby we have been able to observe the formation of spatial shell structures in the density of the trapped atom cloud across the superfluid to Mott insulator transition. In addition we use quantum noise correlations in expanding bosonic and fermionic atom clouds released from the lattice to observe quantum statistical Hanbury‐Brown and Twiss type hunching and antibunching of the atoms and show that this can be used to reveal the ordering of the particles in the lattice.
We propose to utilize density distributions from a series of time-of-flight images of an expanding cloud to reconstruct single-particle correlation functions of trapped ultracold atoms. In particular, we show how this technique can be used to detect off-diagonal correlations of atoms in a quasi-one-dimensional trap, where both real- and momentum-space correlations are extracted at a quantitative level. The feasibility of this method is analyzed with specific examples, taking into account finite temporal and spatial resolutions in experiments.
We theoretically demonstrate that optical measurements of electron spin noise can be a spectroscopic probe of the entangled quantum states of ultracold fermionic atom gases and unambiguously reveal the detailed nature of the underlying interatomic correlations. Different models of the effective interatomic interactions predict entirely new sets of resonances in the spin noise spectrum. Once the correct effective interatomic interaction model is identified, the detailed noise line shapes of the spin noise can be used to constrain this model. We estimate the magnitude of spin noise signals expected in ultracold fermionic atom gases via noise measurements in classical alkali vapors, which demonstrate the feasibility of this approach.
Systems of ultracold atoms in optical potentials have taken a place at the forefront of research into many-body atomic systems because of the clean experimental environment they exist in and the tunability of the system parameters. In this thesis we study how light scattered from these ultracold atomic gases reveals information about the state of the atomic gas and also leads to changes in that state.We begin by investigating the angular dependence of light scattered from atoms in optical lattices at finite temperature. We demonstrate how correlations in the superfluid and Mott insulator states affect the scattering pattern, and we show that temperature affects the number of photons scattered. This effect could be used to measure the temperature of the gas, however, we show that when the lattice band structure is taken into account the efficiency of this temperature measurement is reduced.We then investigate light scattering from small optical lattices where the Bose-Hubbard Hamiltonian can be solved exactly. For small lattices, scattering a photon from the atomic system significantly perturbs the atomic system. We develop a model of the evolution of the many-body state that results from the consecutive scattering and detection of photons. This model shows that light scattering pushes the system towards eigenstates of the light scattering measurement process, in some cases leading to a superposition of atomic states.In the second half of this thesis we study light scattering that depends on the internal hyperfine spin state of the atoms, in which case the scattered light can form images of the spatial atomic spin distribution. We demonstrate how scattering spatially correlated light from the atoms can result in spin state images with enhanced spatial resolution. We also show how using spatially correlated light can lead to direct measurement of the spatial correlations of the atomic spin distribution.We then apply this theory of spin-dependent light scattering to the detection of different spin states of ultracold gases in synthetic magnetic fields. We show that it is possible to distinguish between ground states in the quantum Hall regime using light scattering. Moreover, we show how noise correlation analysis of the spin state images can be used to identify the correlations between atoms and how a variant on phase-contrast imaging can reveal the relationship between the atomic spins.