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Phys. Rev. Lett. 105, 080403 (2010) [4 pages]

Enhanced and Reduced Atom Number Fluctuations in a BEC Splitter

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Kenneth Maussang1, G. Edward Marti1,*, Tobias Schneider1,†, Philipp Treutlein2, Yun Li1,3, Alice Sinatra1, Romain Long1, Jérôme Estève1, and Jakob Reichel1,‡
1Laboratoire Kastler-Brossel, ENS, Université Pierre et Marie Curie-Paris 6, CNRS, 24 rue Lhomond, 75 231 Paris Cedex 05, France
2Departement Physik, Universität Basel, Klingelbergstrasse 82, CH-4056 Basel, Switzerland
3Precision Spectroscopy, Department of Physics, East China Normal University, Shanghai 200062, China

Received 11 May 2010; published 19 August 2010

We measure atom number statistics after splitting a gas of ultracold 87Rb atoms in a purely magnetic double-well potential created on an atom chip. Well below the critical temperature for Bose-Einstein condensation Tc, we observe reduced fluctuations down to -4.9  dB below the atom shot noise level. Fluctuations rise to more than +3.8  dB close to Tc, before reaching the shot noise level for higher temperatures. We use two-mode and classical field simulations to model these results. This allows us to confirm that the supershot noise fluctuations directly originate from quantum statistics.

© 2010 The American Physical Society

URL:
http://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevLett.105.080403
DOI:
10.1103/PhysRevLett.105.080403
PACS:
03.75.Lm, 67.10.Ba, 67.85.-d

*Present address: Department of Physics, University of California, Berkeley, California 94720, USA.

†Present address: Institut für Experimentalphysik, Heinrich Heine Universität, 40225 Düsseldorf, Germany.

‡jakob.reichel@ens.fr

 
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