Observation of atomic speckle and Hanbury Brown–Twiss correlations in guided matter waves

R.G. Dall, S.S. Hodgman, A.G. Manning, M.T. Johnsson, K.G.H. Baldwin and A.G. Truscott ()
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R.G. Dall: ARC Centre of Excellence for Quantum Atom Optics, Research School of Physics and Engineering, Australian National University
S.S. Hodgman: ARC Centre of Excellence for Quantum Atom Optics, Research School of Physics and Engineering, Australian National University
A.G. Manning: ARC Centre of Excellence for Quantum Atom Optics, Research School of Physics and Engineering, Australian National University
M.T. Johnsson: ARC Centre of Excellence for Quantum Atom Optics, Research School of Physics and Engineering, Australian National University
K.G.H. Baldwin: ARC Centre of Excellence for Quantum Atom Optics, Research School of Physics and Engineering, Australian National University
A.G. Truscott: ARC Centre of Excellence for Quantum Atom Optics, Research School of Physics and Engineering, Australian National University

Nature Communications, 2011, vol. 2, issue 1, 1-5

Abstract: Abstract Speckle patterns produced by multiple independent light sources are a manifestation of the coherence of the light field. Second-order correlations exhibited in phenomena such as photon bunching, termed the Hanbury Brown–Twiss effect, are a measure of quantum coherence. Here we observe for the first time atomic speckle produced by atoms transmitted through an optical waveguide, and link this to second-order correlations of the atomic arrival times. We show that multimode matter-wave guiding, which is directly analogous to multimode light guiding in optical fibres, produces a speckled transverse intensity pattern and atom bunching, whereas single-mode guiding of atoms that are output-coupled from a Bose–Einstein condensate yields a smooth intensity profile and a second-order correlation value of unity. Both first- and second-order coherence are important for applications requiring a fully coherent atomic source, such as squeezed-atom interferometry.

Date: 2011
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DOI: 10.1038/ncomms1292

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