Delocalized long-lived states (LLSs) and collective zero-quantum long-lived coherences (LLCs) in aliphatic chains provide a promising route for preserving nuclear spin order with lifetimes that exceed the conventional
T1 and
T2 relaxation times, respectively. Their extended lifetimes make them attractive for applications including hyperpolarization storage, ligand-observed drug screening based on the loss of longevity upon binding to a target protein, and quantum information processing exploiting the collective properties of many-body spin systems. Although LLSs and LLCs have been observed experimentally in methylene networks, their origin and general structure in chains of arbitrary length have remained unclear. Here we show that these relaxation-protected modes follow directly from Redfield relaxation theory. Specifically, we construct the long-lived subspace, i.e., the zero-eigenvalue subspace of the relaxation superoperator associated with the dominant intra-pair dipole--dipole relaxation mechanism. The long-lived subspace contains
2N−1 independent non-trivial operators, which excludes the identity operator, where
N>1 is the number of
−CH2− groups in the chain. In achiral molecules, conservation of the global intra-pair permutation parity restricts experimental access to at most
2N−2 of these operators, whereas in chiral molecules this parity is not conserved, making up to
2N−1 long-lived operators accessible. We further develop a general framework for constructing both LLSs and LLCs in aliphatic chains containing an arbitrary number of
−CH2− groups in achiral molecules, and illustrate the approach explicitly for chains with
N=2, 3, and 4 methylene groups.
Quantum systems in contact with a thermal environment experience coherent and incoherent dynamics. These drive the system back toward thermal equilibrium after an initial perturbation. The relaxation process involves the reorganization of spin state populations and the decay of spin state coherences. In general, individual populations and coherences may exhibit different relaxation time constants. Particular spin configurations may exhibit exceptionally long relaxation time constants. Such spin configurations are known as long-lived spin order. The existence of long-lived spin order is a direct consequence of the symmetries of the system. For nuclear spin systems, rotational and permutational symmetries are of fundamental importance. Based on the Schur-Weyl duality theorem, we describe a theoretical framework for the study of rotational and permutational dual-symmetries in the context of long-lived spin order. Making use of the proposed formalism, we derive refined bounds on the number on long-lived spin populations and coherences for systems exhibiting rotational-permutational dual-symmetries.
We consider the isotropic
S=1 Heisenberg chain with a finite Haldane gap $\mathrm{\ensuremath{\Delta}}$ and use state-of-the-art numerical techniques to investigate its dynamical properties at finite temperature, focusing on the nuclear spin-lattice relaxation rate
1/T1 measured in nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) experiments, for instance. In particular, we analyze the contributions from modes with momenta close to $q\ensuremath{\approx}0$ and $q\ensuremath{\approx}\ensuremath{\pi}$ as a function of temperature. At high-temperature we observe spin diffusion, while at low-temperature we argue that a simple activated behavior $1/{T}_{1}\ensuremath{\propto}exp(\ensuremath{-}\mathrm{\ensuremath{\Delta}}/T)$ can be observed only at temperatures much smaller than the gap $\mathrm{\ensuremath{\Delta}}$.
This thesis proposes conceptually new ways to realize materials with topological properties by using dipole-dipole interactions. First, we study a system of ultracold dipolar fermions, where the relaxation mechanism of dipolar spins can be used to reach the quantum Hall regime. Second, in a system of polar molecules in an optical lattice, dipole-dipole interactions induce spin-orbit coupling terms for the rotational excitations. In combination with time-reversal symmetry breaking this leads to topological bands with Chern numbers greater than one.
We study the properties of spin systems realized by cold polar molecules interacting via dipole-dipole interactions in two dimensions. Using a spin wave theory, that allows for the full treatment of the characteristic long-distance tail of the dipolar interaction, we find several anomalous features in the ground state correlations and the spin wave excitation spectrum, which are absent in their counterparts with short-range interaction. The most striking consequence is the existence of true long-range order at finite temperature for a two-dimensional phase with a broken U(1) symmetry.