Correlations in many-body quantum carpets

In 1836 Henry Fox Talbot, the father of photography, reported an unexpected result – a diffraction grating he was observing through a magnifying lens was reappearing repeatedly in focus as he was moving away. This effect, now dubbed the Talbot effect, is a consequence of a interference of highly coherent waves and it is not surprising that there exists its quantum counterpart. In general, relative phases of states in a quantum superposition evolve in time and for some systems it may happen that these phases cyclically repeat particular configurations, causing a revival of the initial state. Such a behavior inspired many ideas that go by different names, but share the same origin. From within these phenomena, we focus on aesthetically appealing quantum carpets – spatiotemporal representations of a probability density of a quantum particle in a box.