2015/06/30 by Uwe R. Fischer, Myung-Kyun Kang · 30 citations
Chemistry · Physics and Astronomy · #Boson #Coherent states #Cold Atom Physics and Bose-Einstein Condensates #Fock space #Fock state #Matter wave #Photon #Physics #Quantum #Quantum electrodynamics #Quantum mechanics #Quantum optics #Quantum state #Spectroscopy and Laser Applications #State of matter #Strong Light-Matter Interactions #Superposition principle #cond-mat.quant-gas #quant-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevlett.115.260404
published in Physical Review Letters 115(26), 260404 (American Physical Society) · 12 pages including the supplement, 1+3 figures; Schrödinger removed from the title at the request of PRL editors
openalex publication_date 2015/12/28 · arxiv created 2016/05/11 · arxiv updated 2016/05/12 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
We consider ultracold quantum gases of scalar bosons residing in a coupling strength-density regime in which they constitute a twofold fragmented condensate trapped in a single well. It is shown that the corresponding quantum states are, in the appropriate Fock space basis, identical to the photon cat states familiar in quantum optics, which correspond to superpositions of coherent states of the light field with a phase difference of π. In marked distinction to photon cat states, however, the very existence of matter-wave cat states crucially depends on the many-body correlations of the constituent bosons. We consequently establish that the quadratures of the effective "photons," expressing the highly nonclassical nature of the macroscopic matter-wave superposition state, can be experimentally accessed by measuring the density-density correlations of the interacting quantum gas.