Science Publications
Gonzalo A. Álvarez (1), Dieter Suter (2), Robin Kaiser (3)
(1) Department of Chemical Physics, Weizmann Institute of Science, 76100, Rehovot, Israel.
(2) Fakultät Physik, Technische Universität Dortmund, D-44221, Dortmund, Germany.
(3) Institut Non-Linéaire de Nice, CNRS, Université de Nice Sophia Antipolis, 06560, Valbonne, France.
Science 349, 846-848 (2015)
DOI: 10.1126/science.1261160
Abstract
Nonequilibrium dynamics of many-body systems are important in many scientific fields. Here, we report the experimental observation of a phase transition of the quantum coherent dynamics of a three-dimensional many-spin system with dipolar interactions. Using nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) on a solid-state system of spins at room-temperature, we quench the interaction Hamiltonian to drive the evolution of the system. Depending on the quench strength, we then observe either localized or extended dynamics of the system coherence. We extract the critical exponents for the localized cluster size of correlated spins and diffusion coefficient around the phase transition separating the localized from the delocalized dynamical regime. These results show that NMR techniques are well suited to studying the nonequilibrium dynamics of complex many-body systems.
