In this work we present solid-state nuclear magnetic-resonance experiments to study decoherence in the dynamics of many-spin systems. We characterize the global Loschmidt echo and the distribution of multiple-quantum coherence orders during the evolution under dipolar and double-quantum Hamiltonians. To study an infinite
1H system and a closed cluster of nuclear spins we use polycrystalline adamantane and the liquid crystal 5CB in the nematic mesophase, respectively, as model systems. The infinite or finite nature of the system is clearly manifested through spin counting measurements. Comparison between experimental and numerical results gives insights on the decoherence mechanisms in these systems. Contrastingly, the dominating mechanism in 5CB affects all coherence orders in the same way, while in adamantane higher orders of coherence decay faster than the lower ones.
We propose a solid-state hybrid platform based on an array of implanted nitrogen-vacancy (NV) centers in diamond magnetically coupled to a mechanical oscillator. The mechanical oscillator and the NV electronic spins both act as a quantum bus and allow us to induce an effective long-range interaction between distant nuclear spins, relaxing the requirements on their spatial distance. The coherent nuclear spin-spin interaction, having the form of an Ising model, can be maintained in the presence of mechanical damping and spin dephasing via a pulsed dynamical decoupling of the nuclear spins in addition to the microwave driving field of the electronic spins. The present hybrid platform provides a scalable way to prepare multipartite entanglement among nuclear spins with long coherence times and can be applied to generate graph states that may be used for universal quantum computing.
We show that a quantum interference effect in optical absorption from two electronic spin states of a solid-state emitter can be used to prepare the surrounding environment of nuclear spins in well-defined states, thereby suppressing electronic spin dephasing. The coupled electron-nuclei system evolves into a coherent population trapping state by optical-excitation-induced nuclear-spin diffusion for a broad range of initial optical detunings. The spectroscopic signature of this evolution where the single-electron strongly modifies its environment is a drastic broadening of the dark resonance in optical absorption experiments. The large difference in electronic and nuclear time scales allows us to verify the preparation of nuclear spins in the desired state.