Observation of the Presuperfluid Regime in a Two-Dimensional Bose Gas

In complementary images of coordinate-space and momentum-space density in a trapped 2D Bose gas, we observe the emergence of presuperfluid behavior. As phase-space density rho increases toward degenerate values, we observe a gradual divergence of the compressibility kappa from the value predicted by a bare-atom model, kappa(ba).kappa/kappa(ba) grows to 1.7 before rho reaches the value for which we observe the sudden emergence of a spike at p = 0 in momentum space. Momentum-space images are acquired by means of a 2D focusing technique. Our data represent the first observation of non-mean-field physics in the presuperfluid but degenerate 2D Bose gas.