Quantum dynamics of a mobile spin impurity

By Takeshi Fukuhara, A. Kantian, M. Endres, M. Cheneau, P. Schauss, S. Hild, David Bellem, U. Schollwöck, Thierry Giamarchi, C. Gross and 2 more. Nature Physics, 2012

399 citations recorded by the source corpus.

One of the elementary processes in quantum magnetism is the propagation of spin excitations. Here we study the quantum dynamics of a deterministically created spin-impurity atom, as it propagates in a one-dimensional lattice system. We probe the spatial probability distribution of the impurity at different times using single-site-resolved imaging of bosonic atoms in an optical lattice. In the Mott-insulating regime, the quantum-coherent propagation of a magnetic excitation in the Heisenberg model can be observed using a post-selection technique. Extending the study to the superfluid regime of the bath, we quantitatively determine how the bath affects the motion of the impurity, showing evidence of polaronic behaviour. The experimental data agree with theoretical predictions, allowing us to determine the effect of temperature on the impurity motion. Our results provide a new approach to studying quantum magnetism, mobile impurities in quantum fluids and polarons in lattice systems. Understanding the propagation of spin excitations is a difficult problem in quantum magnetism. Using site-resolved imaging in a one-dimensional atomic gas, it is possible to track the dynamics of a moving spin impurity through the Mott-insulator and superfluid regimes.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/6985a2df8f1264a03a0ad1ec8846a5bca4212466

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

Citations in the corpus

Quantum Chaos and Thermalization in Isolated Systems of Interacting Particles (2016, background): “They include solidstate [190, 191, 192] and liquid-state [193] NMR platforms, ultracold atoms, and molecules in optical lattices [194, 195, 196, 197, 198, 199, 200].”
Generalized Gibbs ensemble in integrable lattice models (2016, background): “Other recent experiments that have studied near-integrable dynamics have dealt with strongly interacting bosons on 1D lattices [28, 29], as well as with Ising [30, 31] and Heisenberg [32, 33, 34] spin chains.”
Quantum spin-ice and dimer models with Rydberg atoms (2014, background): “The corresponding periodic structure can either be realized using digital-micromirror-devices (DMD) [67] or by using an optical potential of the form”
Coherent many-body spin dynamics in a long-range interacting Ising chain (2017, methodology): “Our experiments started with the preparation of an atomic chain of ten sites with 87(3)% filling from a Mott insulator using single-site addressing techniques [23,31,32].”