Gaussian tomography for cold-atom simulators

Abstract

A limitation of analog quantum simulators based on cold atoms in optical lattices is that readout is typically limited to observables diagonal in the charge basis, i.e., densities and density correlation functions. To overcome this limitation, we propose experiment-friendly schemes to measure charge-off-diagonal correlations (such as currents). Our protocols use non-interacting dynamics for random times followed by standard quantum gas microscope measurements to effectively measure in random bases. The main requirement of our scheme is the ability to turn off interactions, which can be done in many atomic species using Feshbach resonances. Importantly, our scheme requires no local control and otherwise also exhibits modest requirements in terms of total evolution time and number of repetitions. We numerically demonstrate efficient estimation of bilinear correlation functions, requiring less than $4000$ samples to measure local currents to 5% error (system-size independent) and $\sim 10^4$ samples to simultaneously measure all non-local correlations in 70-site systems. Due to its simplicity, our protocol is implementable in existing platforms and thus paves the way to precision measurements beyond particle number measurements.