  Bosons and fermions, in the presence of frustration or background gauge
fields, can form manybody ground states that support equilibrium 'charge' or
'spin' currents. Motivated by the experimental creation of frustration or
artificial gauge fields in ultracold atomic systems, we propose a general
scheme by which making a sudden anisotropic quench of the atom tunneling across
the lattice and tracking the ensuing density modulations provides a powerful
and gauge invariant route to visualizing diverse equilibrium current patterns.
Using illustrative examples of trapped superfluid Bose and normal Fermi systems
in the presence of artificial magnetic fluxes on square lattices, and
frustrated bosons in a triangular lattice, we show that this scheme to probe
equilibrium bulk current order works independent of particle statistics. We
also show that such quenches can detect chiral edge currents in gapped
topological states, such as quantum Hall or quantum spin Hall insulators.
