Even-odd correlation functions on an optical lattice

We study how different many-body states appear in a quantum-gas microscope, such as the one developed at Harvard [Bakr et al., Nature 462, 74 (2009)], where the site-resolved parity of the atom number is imaged. We calculate the spatial correlations of the microscope images, corresponding to the correlation function of the parity of the number of atoms at each site. We produce analytic results for a number of well-known models: noninteracting bosons, the large-U Bose-Hubbard model, and noninteracting fermions. We find that these parity correlations tend to be less strong than density-density correlations, but they carry similar information.