Search

The violation of a Bell inequality is a striking demonstration of how quantum mechanics contradicts local realism. Although the original argument was presented with a pair of spin 1/2 particles, so far Bell inequalities have been shown to be violated using entangled pairs of photons, with recent measurements closing all possible loopholes in such a scheme. Equivalent demonstrations using massive particles have proven to be much more challenging, generally relying on post-selection of data or measuring an entanglement witness that relies on quantum mechanics. Here, we use a collision between two Bose-Einstein condensates to generate the momentum-spin entangled pairs of ultracold helium atoms. We show that a maximally entangled Bell triplet state results and report a direct observation of a strong Bell correlation witness. Based on the high degree of entanglement and the controllability of ultracold atomic systems, extensions to this scheme would allow a demonstration of nonlocality with massive entangled pairs, following the original idea of Bell. Other applications include the demonstration of the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paradox, quantum metrology and tests of phenomena from exotic theories sensitive to such systems including gravitational decoherence and quantum gravity.

Basing on the analogy between the coherent states of light and separable states of $N$ bosons, we demonstrate that the violation Cauchy-Schwarz inequality for any-order correlation function signals the entanglement among the constituent particles. Rather than restricting to the correlations between the positions of particles, we consider the broadest set of measurements allowed by quantum mechanics. Our result is general -- it applies to any quantum system of bosons, even when the number of particles is not fixed, provided that there is no coherence between different number states. We also demonstrate that the compact expression for the separable state of bosons can be used to relate some known metrological quantities to the particle entanglement in a very simple way., 15 pages, 1 figure

We review the Bogoliubov theory in the context of recent experiments, where atoms are scattered from a Bose-Einstein Condensate into two well-separated regions. We find the full dynamics of the pair-production process, calculate the first and second order correlation functions and show that the system is ideally number-squeezed. We calculate the Fisher information to show how the entanglement between the atoms from the two regions changes in time. We also provide a simple expression for the lower bound of the useful entanglement in the system in terms of the average number of scattered atoms and the number of modes they occupy. We then apply our theory to a recent "twin-beam" experiment [R. B\"ucker {\it et al.}, Nat. Phys. {\bf 7}, 608 (2011)]. The only numerical step of our semi-analytical description can be easily solved and does not require implementation of any stochastic methods., Comment: 11 pages, 6 figures

N.A.

We propose a method for simulating a single realization of a collision of two Bose--Einstein condensates. Recently in Zi\'{n} {\it et al.} (Phys. Rev. Lett. {\bf 94}, 200401 (2005)) we introduced a quantum model of an incoherent elastic scattering in a collision of two counter-propagating atomic Gaussian wavepackets. Here show that this model is capable of generating the data that can be interpreted as results of a single collision event. We find a range of parameters, including relative velocity, population and the size of colliding condensates, where the structure of hallo of scattered atoms in a single realization strongly differs from that averaged over many realizations., Comment: 4 pages, 1 figure