Probing quantum and thermal noise in an interacting many-body system
By Sebastian Hofferberth, Igor Lesanovsky, Thorsten Schumm, A. Imambekov, V. Gritsev, E. Demler, Jörg Schmiedmayer. 2007
214 citations recorded by the source corpus.
The probabilistic character of the measurement process is one of the most puzzling and fascinating aspects of quantum mechanics. In many-body systems quantum-mechanical noise reveals non-local correlations of the underlying many-body states. Here, we provide a complete experimental analysis of the shot-to-shot variations of interference-fringe contrast for pairs of independently created one-dimensional Bose condensates. Analysing different system sizes, we observe the crossover from thermal to quantum noise, reflected in a characteristic change in the distribution functions from poissonian to Gumbel type, in excellent agreement with theoretical predictions on the basis of the Luttinger-liquid formalism. We present the first experimental observation of quasi-long-range order in one-dimensional atomic condensates, which is a hallmark of quantum fluctuations in one-dimensional systems. Furthermore, our experiments constitute the first analysis of the full distribution of quantum noise in an interacting many-body system. The analysis of the interference fringes generated by initially independent one-dimensional Bose condensates reveals contributions of both quantum noise and thermal noise, advancing our fundamental understanding of quantum states in interacting many-body systems.
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f0be61ee6361ecf6d9a731becd9c05e5c0fbbbe8
How researchers see this paper
The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.
Citations in the corpus
- Fermi gases in one dimension: From Bethe ansatz to experiments (2013, methodology): “The techniques of atomic interferometry have been widely used to explore the phase coherence and fluctuations between different 1D gases (Hofferberth et al., 2008; Jo et al., 2007a,b,c; Krüger et al., 2010; Schumm et al., 2005).”
- One-dimensional quantum liquids: Beyond the Luttinger liquid paradigm (2011, background): “…problem of calculating its correlation functions (Korepin et al., 1993), which can be measured using interference (Donner et al., 2007; Hofferberth et al., 2007, 2008; Imambekov et al., 2007, 2008; Polkovnikov et al., 2006), photoassociation (Kinoshita et al., 2005), analysis of…”
- Time-Dependent Impurity in Ultracold Fermions: Orthogonality Catastrophe and Beyond (2012, background): “Moreover, it is possible to measure not only the average values but also fluctuations of quantum observables [75], and in some cases even the full distribution functions [65,76].”
- One dimensional bosons: From condensed matter systems to ultracold gases (2011, methodology): “The prediction of a Gumbel distribution of interference fringe contrasts was checked experimentally (Hofferberth et al., 2008) using 87Rb atoms in radiofrequency microtraps on atom chips.”