The Hanbury Brown Twiss effect for atomic matter waves

Christoph I Westbrook (1) , Denis Boiron (1)

1 laboratoire Charles Fabry de l'Institut d'Optique / Optique atomique

This paper discusses our recent work on developing the matter wave analogs to the Hanbury Brown Twiss experiment. We discuss experiments using cold atoms, both bosons and fermions, both coherent and incoherent. Simple concepts from classical and quantum optics suffice to understand most of the results, but the ideas can also be traced back to the work of Einstein on the thermodynamics of Bose gases.

Mots clés: Hanbury Brown Twiss effect; cold atoms; matter waves

Domaines: Physique Quantique [quant-ph]; Optique [physics.optics]

Christoph I Westbrook, Denis Boiron. The Hanbury Brown Twiss effect for atomic matter waves. Quantum of Quasars Workshop, Dec 2009, Grenoble, France. pp.PoS(QQ09)005. ⟨hal-00473117⟩