LAUSR

Significance In recent years, significant progress concerning matter–wave creation and manipulation has been achieved. Fresnel diffraction, atom lasers, and nonlinear matter wave phenomena are just a few examples of recent interesting research topics. There have also been numerous studies related to the propagation of matter waves interacting with disordered potentials, but not as many concerning the disorder existing into the matter wave itself. In the present study, we analyze the disorder imprinted into a Bose–Einstein condensate (BEC) and its characteristic spatial evolution afterward. We performed careful analyses and traced a few analogies that led us to the conclusion that the perturbed BECs evolve very much in a speckle-like manner, in close analogy with a traveling-light (optical) speckle. We report the results of the direct comparison of a freely expanding turbulent Bose–Einstein condensate and a propagating optical speckle pattern. We found remarkably similar statistical properties underlying the spatial propagation of both phenomena. The calculated second-order correlation together with the typical correlation length of each system is used to compare and substantiate our observations. We believe that the close analogy existing between an expanding turbulent quantum gas and a traveling optical speckle might burgeon into an exciting research field investigating disordered quantum matter.