The Talbot effect in the presence of interactions (B3)

Philipp Hoellmer, Jean-Sebastien Bernier, Corinna Kollath, Christian Baals, Bodhaditya Santra, and Herwig Ott:

Phys. Rev. A 100, 063613 (2019)

🔓 arXiv:1906.05615 (2019)

We study both experimentally and theoretically, considering bosonic atoms in a periodic potential, the influence of interactions in a Talbot interferometer. While interactions decrease the contrast of the revivals, we find that over a wide range of interactions the Talbot signal is still proportional to the phase coherence of the matter wave field. Our results confirm that Talbot interferometry can be a useful tool to study finite-range phase correlations in an optical lattice even in the presence of interactions. The relative robustness of the Talbot signal is supported by the first demonstration of the three-dimensional Talbot effect.

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