2014/11/12 by M. Kohnen, R. A. Nyman · 1 citation
Physics and Astronomy · #cond-mat.quant-gas #quant-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physreva.91.033612
published as Phys. Rev. A, vol. 91, 033612 (2015)
arxiv created 2014/11/12 · arxiv updated 2015/03/16
Density correlations unambiguously reveal the quantum nature of matter. Here, we study correlations between measurements of density in cold-atom clouds at different times at one position, and also at two separated positions. We take into account the effects of finite-size and -duration measurements made by light beams passing through the atom cloud. We specialise to the case of Bose gases in harmonic traps above critical temperature, for weakly-perturbative measurements. For overlapping measurement regions, shot-noise correlations revive after a trap oscillation period. For non-overlapping regions, bosonic correlations dominate at long times, and propagate at finite speeds. Finally, we give a realistic measurement protocol for performing such experiments.