Endoscopic imaging of quantum gases through a fiber bundle

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates endoscopic absorption imaging of quantum gases using a fiber bundle, identifying noise sources and establishing a maximum measurable density for accurate quantitative analysis.

Contribution

It introduces a fiber bundle-based imaging method for quantum gases and provides a criterion to optimize measurement accuracy by avoiding noise-induced limitations.

Findings

Fiber bundle introduces core-to-core coupling noise

Maximum reliably measurable column density is established

Quantitative atomic system information can be retrieved within limits

Abstract

We use a coherent fiber bundle to demonstrate the endoscopic absorption imaging of quantum gases. We show that the fiber bundle introduces spurious noise in the picture mainly due to the strong core-to-core coupling. By direct comparison with free-space pictures, we observe that there is a maximum column density that can be reliably measured using our fiber bundle, and we derive a simple criterion to estimate it. We demonstrate that taking care of not exceeding such maximum, we can retrieve exact quantitative information about the atomic system, making this technique appealing for systems requiring isolation form the environment.