Observation of the Hanbury Brown and Twiss Effect with Ultracold Molecules

Abstract

Measuring the statistical correlations of individual quantum objects provides an excellent way to study complex quantum systems. Ultracold molecules represent a powerful platform for quantum science due to their rich and controllable internal degrees of freedom. However, the detection of correlations between single molecules in an ultracold gas has yet to be demonstrated. Here we observe the Hanbury Brown and Twiss effect in a gas of bosonic ${}^{23}$Na${}^{87}$Rb, enabled by the realization of a quantum gas microscope for molecules. We detect the characteristic bunching correlations in the density fluctuations of a 2D molecular gas released from and subsequently recaptured in an optical lattice. The quantum gas microscope allows us to extract the positions of individual molecules with single-site resolution. As a result, we obtain a high-contrast two-molecule interference pattern with a visibility of $54(13)\%$. While these measured correlations arise purely from the quantum statistics of the molecules, the demonstrated capabilities pave the way toward site-resolved studies of interacting molecular gases in optical lattices.

References in corpus (36)

• A High Phase-Space-Density Gas of Polar Molecules
• Single-Atom Resolved Fluorescence Imaging of an Atomic Mott Insulator
• Quantum computation with trapped polar molecules
• Production of cold molecules via magnetically tunable Feshbach resonances
• Realizing a lattice spin model with polar molecules
• Probing the Superfluid to Mott Insulator Transition at the Single Atom Level
• Probing many-body states of ultra-cold atoms via noise correlations
• Spatial quantum noise interferometry in expanding ultracold atom clouds
• Strongly correlated 2D quantum phases with cold polar molecules: controlling the shape of the interaction potential
• Cold molecules: Progress in Quantum Engineering of Chemistry and Quantum Matter
• Non-classical correlations between single photons and phonons from a mechanical oscillator
• Camparison of the Hanbury Brown-Twiss effect for bosons and fermions
• A lattice of double wells for manipulating pairs of cold atoms
• Creation of an ultracold gas of ground-state ${}^{23}{\mathrm{Na}}^{87}\mathrm{Rb}$ molecules
• Hanbury Brown Twiss effect for ultracold quantum gases
• Correlations and Counting Statistics of an Atom Laser
• An Optical Tweezer Array of Ultracold Molecules
• Quantum Phases of Cold Polar Molecules in 2D Optical Lattices
• Free fermion antibunching in a degenerate atomic Fermi gas released from an optical lattice
• Molecules of Fermionic Atoms in an Optical Lattice
• Phonon counting and intensity interferometry of a nanomechanical resonator
• Quantum gas microscopy for single atom and spin detection
• Direct Laser Cooling of a Symmetric Top Molecule
• Laser cooling of molecules
• A double species ${}^{23}$Na and ${}^{87}$Rb Bose-Einstein condensate with tunable miscibility via an interspecies Feshbach resonance
• Hanbury Brown and Twiss correlations across the Bose-Einstein condensation threshold
• Ideal n-body correlations with massive particles
• Forming a single molecule by magnetoassociation in an optical tweezer
• Formation of Ultracold NaRb Feshbach Molecules
• Direct experimental evidence of free fermion antibunching
• BOUND and FIELD: programs for calculating bound states of interacting pairs of atoms and molecules
• Observation of pairs of atoms at opposite momenta in an equilibrium interacting Bose gas
• High-Contrast Interference of Ultracold Fermions
• Improved characterization of Feshbach resonances and interaction potentials between ${}^{23}$Na and ${}^{87}$Rb atoms
• Quantum point spread function for imaging trapped few-body systems with a quantum gas microscope
• Quantum Noise Correlation Experiments with Ultracold Atoms

Cited by in corpus (18)

• Probing site-resolved correlations in a spin system of ultracold molecules
• Dipolar quantum solids emerging in a Hubbard quantum simulator
• Sub-millisecond Entanglement and iSWAP Gate between Molecular Qubits
• Diatomic molecules of alkali-metal and alkaline-earth-metal atoms: interaction potentials, dipole moments, and polarizabilities
• Observation of counterflow superfluidity in a two-component Mott insulator
• Enhanced quantum state transfer via feedforward cancellation of optical phase noise
• A comparative study of deconvolution techniques for quantum-gas microscope images
• Three-dimensional imaging of single atoms in an optical lattice via helical point-spread-function engineering
• Long distance optical conveyor-belt transport of ultracold ${}^{133}$Cs and ${}^{87}$Rb atoms
• Spin dynamics dominated by superexchange via virtual molecules
• The iSWAP gate with polar molecules: Robustness criteria for entangling operations
• Dissipative Superfluidity in a Molecular Bose-Einstein Condensate
• Quantum uncertainty of optical coherence
• Multi-state detection and spatial addressing in a microscope for ultracold molecules
• Ultracold polar molecules for quantum science and technology
• Strongly dipolar molecular Bose-Einstein condensates: From few- to many-body physics
• Metastable ferromagnetic clusters in dissipative many-body systems of polar molecules
• Preparation of quasi-two-dimensional Bose mixture of ultracold ${}^{23}$Na and ${}^{87}$Rb atoms