Thermal effects in light scattering from ultracold bosons in an optical lattice

TL;DR

This paper investigates how light scattering patterns from ultracold bosons in optical lattices reveal information about their quantum phases, correlations, and temperature effects, linking optical signals to many-body properties.

Contribution

It establishes a connection between scattering angular distributions and the statistical properties of Bose gases, including superfluid and Mott insulator phases, considering effects of dimensionality, temperature, and interactions.

Findings

Angular scattering patterns relate to second-order correlations.

Scattering patterns differ between superfluid and Mott insulator phases.

Temperature and interactions significantly influence scattering distributions.

Abstract

We study the scattering of a weak and far-detuned light from a system of ultracold bosons in 1D and 3D optical lattices. We show the connection between angular distributions of the scattered light and statistical properties of a Bose gas in a periodic potential. The angular patterns are determined by the Fourier transform of the second-order correlation function, and thus they can be used to retrieve information on particle number fluctuations and correlations. We consider superfluid and Mott insulator phases of the Bose gas in a lattice, and we analyze in detail how the scattering depends on the system dimensionality, temperature and atom-atom interactions.