Abstract

The dissociation of a molecular Bose-Einstein condensate into its constituent particles is a process analogous to parametric down-conversion in optics. However, there is additional interest in the fact that the particles are massive, and may obey either bosonic or fermionic statistics. We describe a pairing mean-field theory related to the Hartree-Fock-Bogoliubov approach, and apply it to analyse the correlations present in recent experiments. We also perform calculations using stochastic phase-space methods for the bosonic case and compare the results of the two methods.

© 2007 Optical Society of America