Spatial pair correlations of atoms in molecular dissociation

TL;DR

This paper uses first-principles quantum simulations to analyze how spatial inhomogeneity affects atomic pair correlations in molecular dissociation, revealing degradation of correlations and methods to enhance their detectability.

Contribution

It demonstrates the impact of spatial inhomogeneity on observable correlations and proposes binning techniques to improve their detection in experiments.

Findings

Correlations degrade in inhomogeneous systems compared to uniform models.

Binning can enhance detectable correlations and reveal quantum effects.

Violations of classical inequalities are achievable with appropriate data processing.

Abstract

We perform first-principles quantum simulations of dissociation of trapped, spatially inhomogeneous Bose-Einstein condensates of molecular dimers. Specifically, we study spatial pair correlations of atoms produced in dissociation after time of flight. We find that the observable correlations may significantly degrade in systems with spatial inhomogeneity compared to the predictions of idealized uniform models. We show how binning of the signal can enhance the detectable correlations and lead to the violation of the classical Cauchy-Schwartz inequality and relative number squeezing.