Hanbury Brown-Twiss Interferometry for Fractional and Integer Mott Phases

Abstract

Hanbury-Brown-Twiss interferometry (HBTI) is used to study integer and fractionally filled Mott Insulator (MI) phases in period-2 optical superlattices. In contrast to the quasimomentum distribution, this second order interferometry pattern exhibits high contrast fringes in the it insulating phases. Our detailed study of HBTI suggests that this interference pattern signals the various superfluid-insulator transitions and therefore can be used as a practical method to determine the phase diagram of the system. We find that in the presence of a confining potential the insulating phases become robust as they exist for a finite range of atom numbers. Furthermore, we show that in the trapped case the HBTI interferogram signals the formation of the MI domains and probes the shell structure of the system.

13 pages, 15 figures

References in corpus (6)

• Spatial quantum noise interferometry in expanding ultracold atom clouds
• Phase Diagram for Ultracold Bosons in Optical Lattices and Superlattices
• Single-atom density of states of an optical lattice
• Fractional-filling loophole insulator domains for ultracold bosons in optical superlattices
• Cell strong coupling perturbative approach to the phase diagram of ultracold bosons in optical superlattices
• Fractional-filling Mott domains in two dimensional optical superlattices

Cited by in corpus (4)

• Quantum phases of bosons in double-well optical lattices
• Mean-field phase diagram of cold lattice bosons in disordered potentials
• Theory of correlations between ultra-cold bosons released from an optical lattice
• Critical properties of a trapped interacting Bose gas