Pablo R. Zangara

Time fluctuations in isolated quantum systems of interacting particles.

Numerically, we study the time fluctuations of few-body observables after relaxation in isolated dynamical quantum systems of interacting particles. Our results suggest that they decay exponentially with system size in both regimes, integrable and chaotic. The integrable systems considered are solvable with the Bethe ansatz and have a highly nondegenerate spectrum. This is in contrast with integrable Hamiltonians mappable to noninteracting ones. We show that the coefficient of the exponential decay depends on the level of delocalization of the initial state with respect to the energy shell.

Interaction-disorder competition in a spin system evaluated through the Loschmidt echo

Fil: Zangara, Pablo Rene. Universidad Nacional de Cordoba. Facultad de Matematica, Astronomia y Fisica; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Cientificas y Tecnicas. Centro Cientifico Tecnologico Conicet - Cordoba. Instituto de Fisica Enrique Gaviola. Universidad Nacional de Cordoba. Instituto de Fisica Enrique Gaviola; Argentina

Loschmidt echo as a robust decoherence quantifier for many-body systems

We employ the Loschmidt Echo, i.e. the signal recovered after the reversal of an evolution, to identify and quantify the processes contributing to decoherence. This procedure, which has been extensively used in single particle physics, is here employed in a spin ladder. The isolated chains have 1/2 spins with XY interaction and their excitations would sustain a one-body like propagation. One of them constitutes the controlled system S whose reversible dynamics is degraded by the weak coupling with the uncontrolled second chain, i.e. the environment E. The perturbative SE coupling is swept through arbitrary combinations of XY and Ising like interactions, that contain the standard Heisenberg and dipolar ones. Different time regimes are identified for the Loschmidt Echo dynamics in this perturbative configuration. In particular, the exponential decay scales as a Fermi golden rule, where the contributions of the different SE terms are individually evaluated and analyzed. Comparisons with previous analytical and numerical evaluations of decoherence based on the attenuation of specific interferences, show that the Loschmidt Echo is an advantageous decoherence quantifier at any time, regardless of the S internal dynamics.

Loschmidt echo in many-spin systems: contrasting time scales of local and global measurements.

A local excitation in a quantum many-spin system evolves deterministically. A time-reversal procedure, involving the inversion of the signs of every energy and interaction, should produce the excitation revival. This idea, experimentally coined in nuclear magnetic resonance, embodies the concept of the Loschmidt echo (LE). While such an implementation involves a single spin autocorrelation M1,1, i.e. a local LE, theoretical efforts have focused on the study of the recovery probability of a complete many-body state, referred to here as global or many-body LE MMB. Here, we analyse the relation between these magnitudes, with regard to their characteristic time scales and their dependence on the number of spins N. We show that the global LE can be understood, to some extent, as the simultaneous occurrence of N independent local LEs, i.e. MMB∼(M1,1)N/4. This extensive hypothesis is exact for very short times and confirmed numerically beyond such a regime. Furthermore, we discuss a general picture of the decay of M1,1 as a consequence of the interplay between the time scale that characterizes the reversible interactions (T2) and that of the perturbation (τΣ). Our analysis suggests that the short-time decay, characterized by the time scale τΣ, is greatly enhanced by the complex processes that occur beyond T2. This would ultimately lead to the experimentally observed T3, which was found to be roughly independent of τΣ but closely tied to T2.

Proliferation of effective interactions: Decoherence-induced equilibration in a closed many-body system

We address the question on how weak perturbations, that are quite ineffective in small many-body systems, can lead to decoherence and hence to irreversibility when they proliferate as the system size increases. This question is at the heart of solid state NMR. There, an initially local polarization spreads all over due to spin-spin interactions that conserve the total spin projection, leading to an equilibration of the polarization. In principle, this quantum dynamics can be reversed by changing the sign of the Hamiltonian. However, the reversal is usually perturbed by non reversible interactions that act as a decoherence source. The fraction of the local excitation recovered defines the Loschmidt echo (LE), here evaluated in a series of closed

Charge dynamics in near-surface, variable-density ensembles of nitrogen-vacancy centers in diamond

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Loschmidt echo in many-spin systems: a quest for intrinsic decoherence and emergent irreversibility

spin systems with all-to-all interactions. The most remarkable regime of the LE decay occurs when the perturbation induces proliferated effective interactions. We show that if this perturbation exceeds some lower bound, the decay is ruled by an effective Fermi golden rule (FGR). Such a lower bound shrinks as

Fragility of superposition states evaluated by the Loschmidt echo

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On the long-time asymptotics of quantum dynamical semigroups ∗

increases, becoming the leading mechanism for LE decay in the thermodynamic limit. Once the polarization stayed equilibrated longer than the FGR time, it remains equilibrated in spite of the reversal procedure.

Non-Markovian decay and dynamics of decoherence in private and public environments

Although the spin properties of superficial shallow nitrogen-vacancy (NV) centers have been the subject of extensive scrutiny, considerably less attention has been devoted to studying the dynamics of NV charge conversion near the diamond surface. Using multicolor confocal microscopy, here we show that near-surface point defects arising from high-density ion implantation dramatically increase the ionization and recombination rates of shallow NVs compared to those in bulk diamond. Further, we find that these rates grow linearly, not quadratically, with laser intensity, indicative of single-photon processes enabled by NV state mixing with other defect states. Accompanying these findings, we observe NV ionization and recombination in the dark, likely the result of charge transfer to neighboring traps. Despite the altered charge dynamics, we show that one can imprint rewritable, long-lasting patterns of charged-initialized, near-surface NVs over large areas, an ability that could be exploited for electrochemical biosensing or to optically store digital data sets with subdiffraction resolution.