Fermionic and bosonic atom correlations in molecular dissociation

Dissociation of a molecular dimer produces two quantum mechanically entangled atoms with equal and opposite momenta in the molecule’s rest frame. These atoms have Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen type correlations [1], and hence are of fundamental interest. It is possible to produce Bose-Einstein condensates (BECs) of molecules, and then to dissociate them as in Ref. [2], so that these correlations may be explored experimentally [3] in the regime of large number of particles. Molecular dissociation is of key importance to quantum atom optics due to its close parallels with the famous parametric down-conversion in quantum optics known to produce squeezed light and entangled photon pairs.