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Science 4 August 2006:
Vol. 313. no. 5787, pp. 649 - 652
DOI: 10.1126/science.1130365
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Reports

Imaging the Mott Insulator Shells by Using Atomic Clock Shifts

Gretchen K. Campbell,1* Jongchul Mun,1 Micah Boyd,1 Patrick Medley,1 Aaron E. Leanhardt,2 Luis G. Marcassa,1{dagger} David E. Pritchard,1 Wolfgang Ketterle1

Microwave spectroscopy was used to probe the superfluid–Mott insulator transition of a Bose-Einstein condensate in a three-dimensional optical lattice. By using density-dependent transition frequency shifts, we were able to spectroscopically distinguish sites with different occupation numbers and to directly image sites with occupation numbers from one to five, revealing the shell structure of the Mott insulator phase. We used this spectroscopy to determine the onsite interaction and lifetime for individual shells.

1 MIT-Harvard Center for Ultracold Atoms, Research Laboratory of Electronics, Department of Physics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA.
2 JILA, Boulder, CO 80309, USA.

{dagger} Permanent address: Instituto de Fisica de São Carlos, University of São Paulo, São Paulo 13560-970, Brazil.

* To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: gcampbel{at}mit.edu

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Science. ISSN 0036-8075 (print), 1095-9203 (online)