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arXiv:2510.01158 · Physical Review A

Lattice-enabled detection of spin-dependent three-body interactions

C. Binegar, Jared Austin, Samuel E. Begg, P. Sigdel, Thomas Bilitewski, Yingmei Liu

Published Mar 16, 2026• 2 citations
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Abstract

We present the experimental detection of coherent three-body interactions, often masked by stronger two-body effects, through nonequilibrium spin dynamics induced by controllably quenching lattice-confined spinor gases. Three-body interactions are characterized through both real-time and frequency domain analyses of the observed dynamics. Our results, well-described by an extended Bose-Hubbard model, further demonstrate the importance of three-body interactions for correctly determining atom distributions in lattice systems, which has applications in quantum sensing via spin singlets. The techniques demonstrated in this work can be directly applied to other atomic species, offering a promising avenue for future studies of higher-body interactions with broad relevance to strongly-interacting quantum systems.

DOI
10.1103/l53b-xcn5

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We present the experimental detection of coherent three-body interactions, often masked by stronger two-body effects, through nonequilibrium spin dynamics induced by controllably quenching lattice-confined spinor gases. Three-body interactions are characterized through both real-time and frequency domain analyses of the observed dynamics. Our results, well-described by an extended Bose-Hubbard model, further demonstrate the importance of three-body interactions for correctly determining atom distributions in lattice systems, which has applications in quantum sensing via spin singlets. The techniques demonstrated in this work can be directly applied to other atomic species, offering a promising avenue for future studies of higher-body interactions with broad relevance to strongly-interacting quantum systems.
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We study the dynamics of spin-1 atoms in a periodic optical-lattice potential and an external magnetic field in a quantum quench scenario where we start from a superfluid ground state in a shallow lattice potential and suddenly raise the lattice depth. The time evolution of the nonequilibrium state shows collective collapse-and-revival oscillations of matter-wave coherence as well as oscillations in the spin populations. We show that the complex pattern of these two types of oscillations reveals details about the superfluid and magnetic properties of the initial many-body ground state. Furthermore, we show that the strengths of the spin-dependent and spin-independent atom-atom interactions can be deduced from the observations. The Hamiltonian that describes the physics of the final deep lattice not only contains two-body interactions but also effective multibody interactions, which arise due to virtual excitations to higher bands. We derive these effective spin-dependent three-body interaction parameters for spin-1 atoms and describe how spin mixing is affected. Spinor atoms are unique in the sense that multibody interactions are directly evident in the in situ number densities in addition to the momentum distributions. We treat both antiferromagnetic (e.g., 23{}^{23}23Na) and ferromagnetic (e.g., 87{}^{87}87Rb and 41{}^{41}41K) condensates.
We demonstrate the real-time detection of dynamical phase transitions (DPTs) in lattice-confined spinor gases subject to a priori unknown time-variant interactions, via the temporal behaviors of both the system energy and spinor phases extracted from the observed spin dynamics. Using this technique, we describe the observed nonequilibrium spin dynamics, governed by intricate spin-spatial couplings, across a range of conditions. This work also introduces an observable that can quickly identify DPTs at holding times when commonly-used order parameters still exhibit transient, nonuniversal behavior. Our approach can naturally extend to other complex systems subject to time-dependent parameters, such as Floquet systems under driven magnetic fields, driven interactions, or spin-flopping fields, with potential applications in the study of DPTs in nonintegrable models.
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We present an experimental study demonstrating the manipulation of atom-number distributions of spinor gases after nonequilibrium quantum quenches across superfluid to Mott-insulator phase transitions in cubic optical lattices. Our data indicate that atom distributions in individual Mott lobes can be tuned by properly designing quantum quench sequences, which suggests methods of maximizing the fraction of atoms in Mott lobes of even occupation numbers and has applications in attaining different quantum magnetic phases including massively entangled states. Spatial distributions of gases in three-dimensional lattices are derived from the observed number distributions, which reveal complex spatial dynamics during the quantum quenches. Qualitative agreements are also found between our experimental data and numerical simulations based on time-dependent Gutzwiller approximations in two-dimensional systems.
Quantum simulators are easily controllable quantum systems that allow us to physically model the behavior of more complex systems, that are intractable with even the most advanced supercomputers, to gain insight into their behavior. Using lattice confined spinor Bose-Einstein condensates (BEC) as quantum simulators, we explore the quantum critical dynamics of the superfluid to Mott insulator phase transition in a three-dimensional cubic optical lattice. Our observations reveal that, in a quantum version of the Kibble-Zurek mechanism, the dynamics can be frozen by a sufficiently quick ramp across the transition. Additionally, we utilize discrete energy signatures in nonequilibrium spin mixing dynamics generated by atoms that are tightly confined to single lattice sites after a quench across this transition to understand the spatial dynamics of a BEC during this transition. This "indirect microscopy" method is required to determine the spatial distribution because achieving single lattice site resolved imaging of three dimensional lattice confined quantum gases remains experimentally challenging even with advanced quantum gas microscopy methods. The observed number distributions additionally demonstrate that it may be possible to design lattice ramp sequences to manipulate the distribution of atoms to enhance desired effects.