478 research outputs found
Spin squeezing, entanglement and quantum metrology with Bose-Einstein condensates
Squeezed states, a special kind of entangled states, are known as a useful
resource for quantum metrology. In interferometric sensors they allow to
overcome the "classical" projection noise limit stemming from the independent
nature of the individual photons or atoms within the interferometer. Motivated
by the potential impact on metrology as wells as by fundamental questions in
the context of entanglement, a lot of theoretical and experimental effort has
been made to study squeezed states. The first squeezed states useful for
quantum enhanced metrology have been proposed and generated in quantum optics,
where the squeezed variables are the coherences of the light field. In this
tutorial we focus on spin squeezing in atomic systems. We give an introduction
to its concepts and discuss its generation in Bose-Einstein condensates. We
discuss in detail the experimental requirements necessary for the generation
and direct detection of coherent spin squeezing. Two exemplary experiments
demonstrating adiabatically prepared spin squeezing based on motional degrees
of freedom and diabatically realized spin squeezing based on internal hyperfine
degrees of freedom are discussed.Comment: Phd tutorial, 23 pages, 17 figure
Probing quantum and thermal noise in an interacting many-body system
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. Analyzing 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 based on 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
Bose polarons at finite temperature and strong coupling
A mobile impurity coupled to a weakly interacting Bose gas, a Bose polaron, displays several interesting effects. While a single attractive quasiparticle is known to exist at zero temperature, we show here that the spectrum splits into two quasiparticles at finite temperatures for sufficiently strong impurity-boson interaction. The ground state quasiparticle has minimum energy at Tc, the critical temperature for Bose-Einstein condensation, and it becomes overdamped when T»Tc. The quasiparticle with higher energy instead exists only below Tc, since it is a strong mixture of the impurity with thermally excited collective Bogoliubov modes. This phenomenology is not restricted to ultracold gases, but should occur whenever a mobile impurity is coupled to a medium featuring a gapless bosonic mode with a large population for finite temperature.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft
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