Bragg spectroscopy of strongly correlated bosons in optical lattices

Using inelastic scattering of light (Bragg spectroscopy), we study the lowenergy excitations of strongly correlated phases of ultracold bosons on the cross-over from correlated 1D superfluids to Mott insulators. As it is commonly performed in solid-state physics, the use of such a probe allows us to extract important information about the atomic many-body state. In particular we show that we can extract information about the dynamical structure factor S(q,?) and about the one-particle spectral function A(q,?) from the Bragg spectra. This technique could be extended to study more exotic correlated phases of ultracold atoms.