An in-depth study on the reliability of ToF measurements on quantum field simulators

Nelly is super pleased to share her first paper published with Taufiq, our youngest PhD student in the group :) this project started out when Nelly and Marek was working with our experimental collaborator Jörg Schmiedmayer, back in our Berlin days. Jörg said (paraphrasing), “we really need a systematic theoretical analysis to demonstrate that our measurements are reliable!!” What he meant was, of course, that reconstruction of field observables depend on modelling simplifications, and are also affected by noise and imperfections in measurement setups.

Taufiq, Marek and Nelly took a very long and critical look at how these factors affect the quality of standard time-of-flight measurements done in 1d ultracold gases. Apart from a careful numerical study on the reliability of reconstruction methods, we also derive analytical corrections when dropping modelling assumptions on the expansion of the gas. The most interesting thing that came out of this study is that we identified places where state-of-art reconstruction performs well (and not so well), plus it inspired the formulation of a method to extract new observables (check our follow-up work on this)!

Update: this paper has since been published on Scipost. It’s our group’s first Scipost paper!