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arXiv:cond-mat/0511678 · Physical Review Letters

Detecting Correlation Functions of Ultracold Atoms through Fourier Sampling of Time-of-Flight Images

L-M Duan

Published Mar 15, 2006• 42 citations
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Abstract

We propose a detection method for ultracold atoms which allows reconstruction of the full one-particle and two-particle correlation functions from the measurements. The method is based on Fourier sampling of the time-of-flight images through two consecutive impulsive Raman pulses. For applications of this method, we discuss a few examples, including detection of phase separation between superfluid and Mott insulators, various types of spin or superfluid orders, entanglement, exotic or fluctuating orders.

DOI
10.1103/physrevlett.96.103201

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We propose a detection method for ultracold atoms which allows reconstruction of the full one-particle and two-particle correlation functions from the measurements. The method is based on Fourier sampling of the time-of-flight images through two consecutive impulsive Raman pulses. For applications of this method, we discuss a few examples, including detection of phase separation between superfluid and Mott insulators, various types of spin or superfluid orders, entanglement, exotic or fluctuating orders.
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.
This chapter is devoted to various detection methods that can be used for ultracold atoms, with emphasis on those which cannot be realised in condensed matter systems. It starts by discussing time of flight methods that allow measurement of first order correlations, and then explains time of flight methods and noise correlations, which allow for the determining of higher order correlations. Bragg Spectroscopy and optical Bragg diffraction are then presented. Finally, the chapter discusses the methods exclusive for ultracold atoms: single atom detectors and quantum polarization spectroscopy.
Correlation functions play an important role for the theoretical and experimental characterization of many-body systems. In solid-state systems, they are usually determined through scattering experiments, whereas in cold gases systems, time-of-flight, and in situ absorption imaging are the standard observation techniques. However, none of these methods allow the in situ detection of spatially resolved correlation functions at the single-particle level. Here, we give a more detailed account of recent advances in the detection of correlation functions using in situ fluorescence imaging of ultracold bosonic atoms in an optical lattice. This method yields single-site- and single-atom-resolved images of the lattice gas in a single experimental run, thus gaining direct access to fluctuations in the many-body system. As a consequence, the detection of correlation functions between an arbitrary set of lattice sites is possible. This enables not only the detection of two-site correlation functions but also the evaluation of non-local correlations, which originate from an extended region of the system and are used for the characterization of quantum phases that do not possess (quasi-)long-range order in the traditional sense.
We study the spatial correlations of strongly interacting bosons in a ground state, confined in a two-dimensional square and a three-dimensional cubic lattice. Using the combined Bogoliubov method and the quantum rotor approach, we map the Hamiltonian of strongly interacting bosons onto U(1) phase action in order to calculate the atom-atom correlations' decay along the principal axis and a diagonal of the lattice-plane direction as a function of distance. Lower tunneling rates lead to quicker decays of the correlations, whose character becomes exponential. Finally, correlation functions allow us to calculate quantities that are directly bound to experimental outcomes, namely time-of-flight absorption images and resulting visibility. Our results contain all the characteristic features present in experimental data (transition from Mott insulating blob to superfluid peaks, etc.), emphasizing the usability of the proposed approach.
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].
We propose an all-optical scheme to probe the dynamical correlations of a strongly interacting gas of ultracold atoms in an optical lattice potential. The proposed technique is based on a pump-and-probe scheme: a coherent light pulse is initially converted into an atomic coherence and later retrieved after a variable storage time. The efficiency of the proposed method to measure the two-time one-particle Green function of the gas is validated by numerical and analytical calculations of the expected signal for the two cases of a normal Fermi gas and a BCS superfluid state. Protocols to extract the superfluid gap and the full quasiparticle dispersions are discussed.