Nanoscale engineering and dynamic stabilization of mesoscopic spin textures
Thermalization, while ubiquitous in physics, has traditionally been viewed as an obstacle to be mitigated. In contrast, we demonstrate here the use of thermalization in the generation, control, and readout of "shell-like" spin textures with interacting <sup>13</sup>C nuclear spins in diamond, wherein spins are polarized oppositely on either side of a critical radius. The textures span several nanometers and encompass many hundred spins; they are created and interrogated without manipulating the nuclear spins individually. Long-time stabilization is achieved via prethermalization to a Floquet-engineered Hamiltonian under the electronic gradient field: The texture is therefore metastable and robust against spin diffusion. This enables the state to endure over multiple minutes before it decays. Our work on spin-state engineering paves the way for applications in quantum simulation and nanoscale imaging.
Authors
- Maxwell McAllister (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1333-5198)
- William Beatrez (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4071-9402)
- Marin Bukov (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3688-9599)
- Kieren A. Harkins
- Arjun Pillai (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9500-1887)
- Paul Reshetikhin (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2236-7359)
- David A. Marchiori (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9738-3674)
- Quentin Reynard-Feytis (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7335-1491)
- Aniruddha Nayak (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4407-803X)
- Ashok Ajoy (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3242-2913)
- Christoph Fleckenstein (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6750-3265)
- Emanuel Druga (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3825-7771)
- Paul M. Schindler (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0973-5444)
- Claudia Artiaco (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0141-1878)
- M. Hagn (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0007-0132-4436)
- Ushoshi Basumallick
- Xudong Lv (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5601-3789)
- Samantha Breuer
- Noella D’Souza (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0001-7524-4726)
Institutions
- Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CA)
- California Institute of Technology (US)
- Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (US)
- Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems (DE)
- KTH Royal Institute of Technology (SE)
- University of California, Berkeley (US)
Publication Details
- Journal
- Science Advances
- Published
- 2025-03-28
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.adn9021
- Citations
- 3
- Primary Topic
- Quantum many-body systems
- Type
- article
- Field-Weighted Citation Impact
- 3.74