Tan’s two-body contact across the superfluid transition of a planar Bose gas

Abstract

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 ⁸⁷Rb 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.