NUK - logo
E-resources
Peer reviewed Open access
  • Tan's two-body contact acro...
    Zou, Y-Q; Bakkali-Hassani, B; Maury, C; Le Cerf, É; Nascimbene, S; Dalibard, J; Beugnon, J

    Nature communications, 02/2021, Volume: 12, Issue: 1
    Journal Article

    Tan's contact is a quantity that unifies many different properties of a low-temperature gas with short-range interactions, from its momentum distribution to its spatial two-body correlation function. Here, we use a Ramsey interferometric method to realize experimentally the thermodynamic definition of the two-body contact, i.e., the change of the internal energy in a small modification of the scattering length. Our measurements are performed on a uniform two-dimensional Bose gas of Rb atoms across the Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless superfluid transition. They connect well to the theoretical predictions in the limiting cases of a strongly degenerate fluid and of a normal gas. They also provide the variation of this key quantity in the critical region, where further theoretical efforts are needed to account for our findings.