Characterizing four-body indistinguishability via symmetries

Abstract

We show how to characterize the indistinguishability of up to four identical, bosonic or fermionic particles, which are rendered partially distinguishable through their internal degrees of freedom prepared in mixed states. This is accomplished via their counting statistics when subjected to a highly symmetric unitary acting upon their external (i.e. dynamical) degrees of freedom. For pure internal states, we further extract information on the particles’ collective phases, which ultimately allows for an experimental reconstruction of the full many-particle density operator up to complex conjugation.

Keywords

• indistinguishability
• many-body interference
• identical particles
• density operator reconstruction