Evolution of room-temperature magnon gas toward coherent Bose-Einstein condensate

The appearance of spontaneous coherence is a fundamental feature of a Bose-Einstein condensate and an essential requirement for possible applications of the condensates for data processing and quantum computing. In the case of a magnon condensate in a magnetic crystal, such computing can be performed even at room temperature. So far, the process of coherence formation in a magnon condensate was inaccessible. We study the evolution of magnon radiation spectra by direct detection of microwave radiation emitted by magnons in a parametrically driven yttrium iron garnet crystal. By using specially shaped bulk samples, we show that the parametrically overpopulated magnon gas evolves to a state, whose coherence is only limited by the natural magnon relaxation into the crystal lattice.