We demonstrate that inelastic neutron scattering technique can be used to indirectly detect and measure the macroscopic quantum correlations quantified by both entanglement and discord in a quantum magnetic material, VODPO4 . 1D2O. The amount of quantum correlations is obtained 2 by analyzing the neutron scattering data of magnetic excitations in isolated V4+ spin dimers. Our quantitative analysis shows that the critical temperature of this material can reach as high as Tc = 82.5 K, where quantum entanglement drops to zero. Significantly, quantum discord can even survive at Tc = 300 K and may be used in room temperature quantum devices. Taking into account the spin-orbit (SO) coupling, we also predict theoretically that entanglement can be significantly enhanced and the critical temperature Tc increases with the strength of spin-orbit coupling.
Quantum correlations are a fundamental property of quantum many-body states. Yet they remain experimentally elusive, hindering certification of genuine quantum behavior, especially in quantum materials. Here we show that the momentum-dependent dynamical susceptibility measured via inelastic neutron scattering enables the systematic reconstruction of a general family of quantum correlation functions, which express the degree of quantum coherence in the fluctuations of two spins at arbitrary mutual distance. Using neutron scattering data on the compound KCuF
3 $\unicode{x2014}$ a system of weakly coupled
S=1/2 Heisenberg chains $\unicode{x2014}$ and of numerically exact quantum Monte Carlo data, we show that quantum correlations possess a radically different spatial structure with respect to conventional correlations. Indeed, they exhibit a new emergent length scale $\unicode{x2014}$ the quantum coherence length $\unicode{x2014}$ which is finite at any finite temperature (including when long-range magnetic order develops). Moreover, we show theoretically that coupled Heisenberg spin chains exhibit a form of quantum monogamy, with a trade-off between quantum correlations along and transverse to the spin chains. These results highlight real-space quantum correlators as an informative, model-independent means of probing the underlying quantum state of real quantum materials.