Atom-atom correlations and relative number squeezing in dissociation of spatially inhomogeneous molecular condensates

TL;DR

This paper analyzes how the spatial shape of a molecular Bose-Einstein condensate influences atom-atom correlations and number squeezing during dissociation, providing explicit analytic results for short-time correlation functions.

Contribution

It offers the first explicit analytic expressions linking molecular condensate shape to atom-atom correlation strength and squeezing in dissociation processes.

Findings

Correlation widths depend on molecular condensate shape

Relative number squeezing is determined by condensate geometry

Analytic formulas for density-density correlations in momentum space

Abstract

We study atom-atom correlations and relative number squeezing in the dissociation of a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) of molecular dimers made of either bosonic or fermionic atom pairs. Our treatment addresses the role of the spatial inhomogeneity of the molecular BEC on the strength of correlations in the short time limit. We obtain explicit analytic results for the density-density correlation functions in momentum space, and show that the correlation widths and the degree of relative number squeezing are determined merely by the shape of the molecular condensate.