Science, Vol.352, No.6284, 441-444, 2016
Bell correlations in a Bose-Einstein condensate
Characterizing many-body systems through the quantum correlations between their constituent particles is a major goal of quantum physics. Although entanglement is routinely observed in many systems, we report here the detection of stronger correlations-Bell correlations-between the spins of about 480 atoms in a Bose-Einstein condensate. We derive a Bell correlation witness from a many-particle Bell inequality involving only one-and two-body correlation functions. Our measurement on a spin-squeezed state exceeds the threshold for Bell correlations by 3.8 standard deviations. Our work shows that the strongest possible nonclassical correlations are experimentally accessible in many-body systems and that they can be revealed by collective measurements.