Tomography of correlation functions for ultracold atoms via time-of-flight images

Abstract

We propose to utilize density distributions from a series of time-of-flight images of an expanding cloud to reconstruct single-particle correlation functions of trapped ultra-cold atoms. In particular, we show how this technique can be used to detect off-diagonal correlations of atoms in a quasi-one-dimensional trap, where both real- and momentum- space correlations are extracted at a quantitative level. The feasibility of this method is analyzed with specific examples, taking into account finite temporal and spatial resolutions in experiments.