Full counting statistics of interacting lattice gases after an expansion: The role of condensate depletion in many-body coherence

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, that includes the regime where the condensate is strongly depleted by interactions. These results suggest that the condensate component exhibits a full coherence g⁽ⁿ⁾(0) =1 at any order n up to $n=6$ and at arbitrary interaction strengths. The approach demonstrated here is readily extendable to characterize a large variety of interacting quantum states and phase transitions.