Abstract
Investigating out-of-equilibrium dynamics with two-dimensional (2D) systems is of widespread theoretical interest, as these systems are strongly influenced by fluctuations and there exists a superfluid phase transition at a finite temperature. In this work, we realise matter-wave interference for degenerate Bose gases, including the first demonstration of coherent splitting of 2D Bose gases using magnetic trapping potentials. We improve the fringe contrast by imaging only a thin slice of the expanded atom clouds, which will be necessary for subsequent studies on the relaxation of the gas following a quantum quench.
Highlights
A pioneering early experiment on Bose–Einstein condensates (BECs) was the demonstration of matter-wave interference (MWI) when two clouds of ultracold atoms overlap after being released from their confining potentials [1]
The dynamics of ultracold atoms occur on experimentally observable timescales, these systems are ideal environments to study out-of-equilibrium phenomena in real time [8,9,10,11]
The access to the phase distributions provided by MWI permits the investigation of phase fluctuations which are intrinsic to low-dimensional quantum systems [8, 12,13,14] and prevent the formation of true long-range order [15]
Summary
A pioneering early experiment on Bose–Einstein condensates (BECs) was the demonstration of matter-wave interference (MWI) when two clouds of ultracold atoms overlap after being released from their confining potentials [1]. We demonstrate significant progress towards studies of out-of-equilibrium dynamics in 2D systems, including the first demonstration of coherent splitting of 2D gases confined by magnetic double-well potentials. These traps are formed by dressing atoms with multiple RF (radiofrequency) fields [30,31,32], whose amplitudes can be controlled to tune each trapping well between three-dimensional (3D) and quasi-2D confinement [21, 33]; their extremely low heating rates make them ideally suited to studies of time-dependent processes.
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