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  • Open Access

Gaussian tomography for cold-atom simulators

Matthew Kiser1,2,*, Max McGinley3, and Daniel Malz4,5

  • *Contact author: matthew.kiser@tum.de
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Phys. Rev. A 114, 013311 – Published 13 July, 2026

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/nkwy-23tw

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 noninteracting 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 ∼104 samples to simultaneously measure all nonlocal 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.

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Phys. Rev. A 114, 013311– Published 13 July, 2026
  • Received 7 December 2025
  • Revised 20 April 2026
  • Accepted 22 June 2026
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Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article's title, journal citation, and DOI.

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