Full counting statistics of interacting lattice gases after an expansion: quantifying many-body coherence from atom correlations

We study the full counting statistics (FCS) of quantum gases in samples of thousands of interacting bosons, detected atom-by-atom after a long free-fall expansion. In this far-field configuration, the FCS reveals the many-body coherence from which we characterize iconic states of interacting lattice bosons, by deducing the normalized correlations $g^{(n)}(0)$ up to the order $n=6$. In Mott insulators, we find a thermal FCS characterized by perfectly-contrasted correlations $g^{(n)}(0)= n!$. In interacting Bose superfluids, we observe small deviations to the Poisson FCS and to the ideal values $g^{(n)}(0)=1$ expected for a pure condensate. To describe these deviations, we introduce a heuristic model that includes an incoherent contribution attributed to the depletion of the condensate. The predictions of the model agree quantitatively with our measurements over a large range of interaction strengths, suggesting that the condensate component exhibits a full coherence $g^{(n)}(0) =1$ at any order $n$ up to $n=6$. The approach demonstrated here is readily extendable to characterize a large variety of interacting quantum states and phase transitions