Entanglement between a muon spin and I>1/2 nuclear spins
Creators
- 1. Dipartimento di Scienze Matematiche, Fisiche e Informatiche, Università di Parma, Parco Area delle Scienze 7/A, I-43124 Parma, Italy
- 2. Centro S3, CNR-Istituto Nanoscienze, via Campi 213/A, I-41125 Modena, Italy
- 3. Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Bologna, Italy
- 4. Clarendon Laboratory, Department of Physics, University of Oxford, Parks Road, Oxford OX1 3PU, United Kingdom
- 5. Department of Physics, University of Pavia, Italy
- 6. Department of Mathematical, Physical and Computer Sciences, University of Parma, Italy
- 7. Laboratory for Muon Spin Spectroscopy, Paul Scherrer Institute, CH-5232 Villigen, Switzerland
- 8. Superconducting Radio Frequency (SRF) Materials and Research Department, Fermilab, Batavia, USA
- 9. Elettra-Sincrotrone Trieste, S.S. 14-km 163.5, Basovizza, 34149 Trieste, Italy
- 10. Department of Physics, Brown University, Providence, 02912 Rhode Island, USA
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Description
We report on the first example of quantum coherence between the spins of muons and quadrupolar nuclei. We observe this effect in vanadium intermetallic compounds which adopt the A15 crystal structure, and whose members include all technologically dominant superconductors. The entangled states are extremely sensitive to the local structural and electronic environments through the electric field gradient at the quadrupolar nuclei. This case-study demonstrates that positive muons can be used as a quantum sensing tool to probe also structural and charge related phenomena in materials, even in the absence of magnetic order. The data here contained can be used to reproduce all results and graphs shown in the article.
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References
Preprint P. Bonfà, J. Frassineti, J. M. Wilkinson, G. Prando, M. M. Isah, C. Wang, T. Spina, B. Joseph, V. Mitrović, R. De Renzi, S. J. Blundell, S. Sanna, Phys. Rev. Lett. 129, 097205 (2022), doi: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.129.097205