| Issue |
EPL
Volume 78, Number 1, April 2007
|
|
|---|---|---|
| Article Number | 10006 | |
| Number of page(s) | 5 | |
| Section | General | |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1209/0295-5075/78/10006 | |
| Published online | 14 March 2007 | |
Shot noise of interference between independent atomic systems
Department of Physics, Boston University - Boston, MA 02215, USA
Received:
4
December
2006
Accepted:
13
February
2007
We study shot (counting) noise of the amplitude of interference between independent atomic systems. In particular, for the two interfering systems the variance of the fringe amplitude decreases as the inverse power of the number of particles per system with the coefficient being a non-universal number. This number depends on the details of the initial state of each system so that the shot noise measurements can be used to distinguish between such states. We explicitly evaluate this coefficient for the two cases of the interference between bosons in number states and in broken symmetry states. We generalize our analysis to the interference of multiple independent atomic systems. We show that the variance of the interference contrast vanishes as the inverse power of the number of the interfering systems. This result, implying high signal to noise ratio in the interference experiments, holds both for bosons and for fermions.
PACS: 03.75.Dg – Atom and neutron interferometry / 03.75.Lm – Tunneling, Josephson effect, Bose-Einstein condensates in periodic potentials, solitons, vortices, and topological excitations
© Europhysics Letters Association, 2007
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