Person:

Knap, Michael

We propose to use Ramsey interferometry and single-site addressability, available in synthetic matter such as cold atoms or trapped ions, to measure real-space and time-resolved spin correlation functions. These correlation functions directly probe the excitations of the system, which makes it possible to characterize the underlying many-body states. Moreover, they contain valuable information about phase transitions where they exhibit scale invariance. We also discuss experimental imperfections and show that a spin-echo protocol can be used to cancel slow fluctuations in the magnetic field. We explicitly consider examples of the two-dimensional, antiferromagnetic Heisenberg model and the one-dimensional, long-range transverse field Ising model to illustrate the technique.

We study experimentally the far-from-equilibrium dynamics in ferromagnetic Heisenberg quantum magnets realized with ultracold atoms in an optical lattice. After controlled imprinting of a spin spiral pattern with an adjustable wave vector, we measure the decay of the initial spin correlations through single-site resolved detection. On the experimentally accessible time scale of several exchange times, we find a profound dependence of the decay rate on the wave vector. In one-dimensional systems, we observe diffusionlike spin transport with a dimensionless diffusion coefficient of 0.22(1). We show how this behavior emerges from the microscopic properties of the closed quantum system. In contrast to the one-dimensional case, our transport measurements for two-dimensional Heisenberg systems indicate anomalous superdiffusion.