We introduce a technique utilizing the evanescent field of an optical waveguide to examine the dynamics of nonequilibrium high-frequency phonons resonant with optically excited centers in zones of submicrometer dimension. The technique is used to create a nearly saturated zone of excited
Cr3+ ions at the surface of a 700-at. ppm ruby crystal at 1.5 K by optical pumping through the broad bands. At the same time, the optical pumping serves to generate resonant 29-${\mathrm{cm}}^{\mathrm{\ensuremath{-}}1}$ phonons. The decay of the combined spin-phonon system, measured via the
R2 luminescence following interruption of the optical pumping, is explained by elastic spatial diffusion in parallel with spectral wipeout. The time constant for loss by spatial diffusion is derived rigorously from rate equations. Spectral wipeout is treated according to the model developed by Goossens et al. based on one-site inelastic scattering by weakly exchange-coupled
Cr3+ pairs, but modified to include the appreciable elastic diffusion remaining after wipeout under the present extreme conditions. Spectral wipeout turns out to predominate at high excited-state concentration. The optical feeding into 2A\ifmmode\bar\else\textasciimacron\fi{}
(2E) is found to result mainly from excited-state absorption starting from E\ifmmode\bar\else\textasciimacron\fi{}
(2E), despite the low probability of the latter at the light wavelength used (514.5 nm).
Numerical and analytic results have been used to characterize quantum transport in spin chains, showing the existence of both ballistic and diffusive motion. Experiments have shown that heat transfer is surprisingly always diffusive. The scattering from phonons and impurities have been postulated to be the two factors critical in causing the diffusive transport. In this work, we evaluate the transport process by incorporating a bath of phonons and impurities in order to understand the role played by each of the factors. While methods like time-dependent density matrix renormalization group (tDMRG) can be used to simulate isolated spin chains, the coupling with phonons make simulations significantly more challenging. The recently developed multisite tensor network path integral (MS-TNPI) method builds a framework for simulating the dynamics in extended open quantum systems by combining ideas from tDMRG and Feynman-Vernon influence functional. This MS-TNPI is used to characterize dynamics in open, extended quantum systems. Simulations are done with the commonly used sub-Ohmic, Ohmic and super-Ohmic spectral densities describing the phononic bath. We show that while the transport in presence of impurities eventually becomes diffusive, the exact details are dependent on the specifics of the interactions and amount of impurities. In contrast, the presence of a bath makes the transport diffusive irrespective of the parameters characterizing the bath.