Matter wave interference of dilute Bose gases in the critical regime**Project supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 11504328, 11274024, and 11334001) and the National Basic Research Program of China (Grants Nos. 2013CB921903 and 2012CB921300).

Abstract

Ultra-cold atomic gases provide a new chance to study the universal critical behavior of phase transition. We study theoretically the matter wave interference for ultra-cold Bose gases in the critical regime. We demonstrate that the interference in the momentum distribution can be used to extract the correlation in the Bose gas. A simple relation between the interference visibility and the correlation length is found and used to interpret the pioneering experiment about the critical behavior of dilute Bose gases [Science 315 1556 (2007)]. Our theory paves the way to experimentally study various types of ultra-cold atomic gases with the means of matter wave interference.