The Hong-Ou-Mandel (HOM) effect is a striking demonstration of destructive
quantum interference between pairs of indistinguishable bosons, realised so far
only with massless photons. Here we propose an experiment which can realise
this effect in the matter-wave regime using pair-correlated atoms produced via
a collision of two Bose-Einstein condensates and subjected to two laser induced
Bragg pulses. We formulate a novel measurement protocol appropriate for the
multimode matter-wave field, which---unlike the typical two-mode optical
case---bypasses the need for repeated measurements under different displacement
settings of the beam-splitter, thus dramatically reducing the number of
experimental runs required to map out the interference visibility. The protocol
can be utilised in related matter-wave schemes; here we focus on condensate
collisions and by simulating the entire experiment we predict a HOM-dip
visibility of ~69%. By being larger than 50%, such a visibility highlights
strong quantum correlations between the atoms and paves the way for a possible
demonstration of a Bell inequality violation with massive particles in a
related Rarity-Tapster setup.Comment: Essentially the same version as v2, except in Nature Communications
style; for Supplementary Information see the source fil
