Optically pumped spin polarization as a probe of many-body thermalization

Authors

Daniela Pagliero, CUNY City CollegeFollow
Pablo R. Zangara, Universidad Nacional de Córdoba
Jacob Henshaw, CUNY City College
Ashok Ajoy, University of California, Berkeley
Rodolfo H. Acosta, Universidad Nacional de Córdoba
Jeffrey A. Reimer, University of California, Berkeley
Alexander Pines, University of California, Berkeley
Carlos A. Meriles, CUNY City CollegeFollow

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

5-1-2020

Abstract

Disorder and many body interactions are known to impact transport and thermalization in competing ways, with the dominance of one or the other giving rise to fundamentally different dynamical phases. Here we investigate the spin diffusion dynamics of ¹³C in diamond, which we dynamically polarize at room temperature via optical spin pumping of engineered color centers. We focus on low-abundance, strongly hyperfine-coupled nuclei, whose role in the polarization transport we expose through the integrated impact of variable radio-frequency excitation on the observable bulk ¹³C magnetic resonance signal. Unexpectedly, we find good thermal contact throughout the nuclear spin bath, virtually independent of the hyperfine coupling strength, which we attribute to effective carbon-carbon interactions mediated by the electronic spin ensemble. In particular, observations across the full range of hyperfine couplings indicate the nuclear spin diffusion constant takes values up to two orders of magnitude greater than that expected from homo-nuclear spin couplings.

Comments

This work was originally published in Science Advances, available at https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.aaz6986.

Copyright © 2020 The Authors, some rights reserved; exclusive licensee American Association for the Advancement of Science. No claim to original U.S. Government Works. Distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial License 4.0 (CC BY-NC).