Quantum Atom Optics with Correlated Bosons and Fermions

ARC Centre of Excellence for Quantum Atom Optics, University of Queensland

3:30pm Friday 8 April, Virtual Reality Theatre, 4th Floor, Applied Sciences Building

Correlated photon pairs from parametric down-conversion are in the heart of the most important applications in quantum optics. Matter-wave analog of this resource can be produced via dissociation of a Bose-Einstein condensate of diatomic molecules into pair-correlated atomic wave packets. The physics behind this process, which can involve either bosonic or fermionic atoms, offers a rich playground for the new emerging field of Quantum Atom Optics. In these talk, I will review the recent developments in the theory and experiments on molecule dissociation. This will include a brief overview of the earlier theoretical work on squeezing in twin beams of bosonic atoms, followed by a discussion of more recent results involving fermionic atoms, in which case the analogies with optics are limited. This last fermionic is relevant to the recent experiments in D. Jin's group at JILA [PRL, March 2005], which probe -- for the first time - atomic pair correlations through atom shot-noise.

Back to 2005 programme