Recent experiments demonstrate all-electric spinning of levitated nanodiamonds with embedded nitrogen-vacancy spins. Here, we argue that such gyroscopically stabilized spin rotors offer a promising platform for probing and exploiting quantum spin-rotation coupling of particles hosting a single spin degree of freedom. Specifically, we derive the effective Hamiltonian describing how an embedded spin affects the rotation of rapidly revolving quantum rotors due to the Einstein-de Haas and Barnett effects, which we use to devise experimental protocols for observing this coupling in state-of-the-art experiments. This will open the door for future exploitations of quantum spin rotors for superposition experiments with massive objects.
@article{arxiv.2504.10339,
title = {Gyroscopically stabilized quantum spin rotors},
author = {Vanessa Wachter and Silvia Viola Kusminskiy and Gabriel Hétet and Benjamin A. Stickler},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2504.10339},
year = {2026}
}
Comments
v2: Revised version with extended Supplemental Material; matches published version in Phys. Rev. Lett