A Microscopic View on Quantum Fluctuations
Schematic view of the atom distribution in the optical lattice. Quantum fluctuations (white) are directly visible as neighbouring dark spots. The picture shows a rendered image of an original dataset. On top of a fixed density background, quantum fluctuations in a bosonic Mott insulator emerge as bound pairs of an empty site and a doubly occupied site (called particle-hole pairs). In the experiment, the atoms on doubly occupied sites are lost in the detection process due to collisions. Therefore particle-hole pairs show up as neighboring empty sites (marked as white handles).
