Atomic squeezed states on an atom-chip

In this thesis, we describe the construction of an experiment, allowing to produce 87Rb Bose-Einstein condensates on an atom chip, and then split them in a double well potential. An accurate imaging system has been developed, in order to be able to measure the absolute value of the populations of the double well within a very low noise level, almost limited by the optical shot noise. We measure atom number statistics after splitting, and directly observe number squeezed states, down to -4.9 dB at low temperatures, compared to a classical gas, of independent particles. The dependence in temperature of fluctuations has been also studied. For a thermal gas, Poissonian fluctuations are given by the probability distribution of the macroscopic configurations with a given atom number difference. In the degenerate regime, the entropy effect which favors small number differences vanishes, leading to super-Poissonian fluctuations, to more than +3.8 dB close to transition temperature. At low temperatures, the interaction energy cost associated with number fluctuations exceeds the available thermal energy, leading to sub-Poissonian fluctuations. Those two behaviours have been theoretically explained, both with a simple analytical model and a numerical one. We also measured the evolution of the relative phase between the two clouds, and its collapse due to interactions, allowing us to claim that this splitter is a coherent one. (author)