Optical detection of a fractional particle number in an atomic Fermi-Dirac gas

Javanainen, Juha and Ruostekoski, Janne (2003) Optical detection of a fractional particle number in an atomic Fermi-Dirac gas. Physical review letters, 91 (15): 150404. ISSN 1079-7114

Abstract

We consider a Fermi-Dirac atomic gas in a one-dimensional optical lattice coupled to a coherent electromagnetic field with a topologically nontrivial soliton phase profile. We argue that the resulting fractional eigenvalues of the particle number operator can be detected via light scattering. This could be a truly quantum mechanical measurement of the particle number fractionalization in a dilute atomic gas.