Probing many-body dynamics in a two-dimensional dipolar spin ensemble

E J Davis; B Ye; F Machado; S A Meynell; W Wu; T Mittiga; W Schenken; M Joos; B Kobrin; Y Lyu; Z Wang; D Bluvstein; S Choi; C Zu; A C Bleszynski Jayich; N Y Yao

doi:10.1038/s41567-023-01944-5

Probing many-body dynamics in a two-dimensional dipolar spin ensemble

Nat Phys. 2023;19(6):836-844. doi: 10.1038/s41567-023-01944-5. Epub 2023 Mar 16.

Authors

E J Davis^#¹, B Ye^#¹, F Machado^#^{1

2}, S A Meynell³, W Wu^{1

2}, T Mittiga^{1

2}, W Schenken³, M Joos³, B Kobrin^{1

2}, Y Lyu¹, Z Wang^{1

2}, D Bluvstein⁴, S Choi¹, C Zu^{1

2

5}, A C Bleszynski Jayich³, N Y Yao^{1

2

4}

Affiliations

¹ Department of Physics, University of California, Berkeley, CA USA.
² Materials Science Division, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA USA.
³ Department of Physics, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA USA.
⁴ Department of Physics, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA USA.
⁵ Department of Physics, Washington University, St. Louis, MO USA.

^# Contributed equally.

Abstract

The most direct approach for characterizing the quantum dynamics of a strongly interacting system is to measure the time evolution of its full many-body state. Despite the conceptual simplicity of this approach, it quickly becomes intractable as the system size grows. An alternate approach is to think of the many-body dynamics as generating noise, which can be measured by the decoherence of a probe qubit. Here we investigate what the decoherence dynamics of such a probe tells us about the many-body system. In particular, we utilize optically addressable probe spins to experimentally characterize both static and dynamical properties of strongly interacting magnetic dipoles. Our experimental platform consists of two types of spin defects in nitrogen delta-doped diamond: nitrogen-vacancy colour centres, which we use as probe spins, and a many-body ensemble of substitutional nitrogen impurities. We demonstrate that the many-body system's dimensionality, dynamics and disorder are naturally encoded in the probe spins' decoherence profile. Furthermore, we obtain direct control over the spectral properties of the many-body system, with potential applications in quantum sensing and simulation.

Keywords: Magnetic properties and materials; Quantum metrology; Quantum simulation; Sensors and biosensors.