  Introduction Cold atomic gases in optical lattices are emerging as excellent
laboratories for testing models of strongly interacting particles in condensed
matter physics. Currently, one of the major open questions is how to obtain the
finite temperature phase diagram of a given quantum Hamiltonian directly from
experiments. Previous work in this direction required quantum Monte Carlo
simulations to directly model the experimental situation in order to extract
quantitative information, clearly defeating the purpose of an optical lattice
emulator. Here we propose a new method that utilizes deviations from a local
fluctuation dissipation theorem to construct a finite temperature phase
diagram, for the first time, from local observables accessible by in situ
experimental observations. Our approach extends the utility of the
fluctuation-dissipation theorem from thermometry to the identification of
quantum phases, associated energy scales and the quantum critical region. We
test our ideas using state-of-the-art large-scale quantum Monte Carlo
simulations of the two-dimensional Bose Hubbard model.
