English

Spin-Energy Entanglement of a Time-Focused Neutron

Quantum Physics 2024-10-02 v2 Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics Materials Science Strongly Correlated Electrons Instrumentation and Detectors

Abstract

Intra-particle entanglement of individual particles such as neutrons could enable another class of scattering probes that are sensitive to entanglement in quantum systems and materials. In this work, we present experimental results demonstrating quantum contextuality as a result of entanglement between the spin and energy modes (i.e., degrees of freedom) of single neutrons in a beam using a pair of resonant radio-frequency neutron spin flippers in the MIEZE configuration (Modulated IntEnsity with Zero Effort). We verified the mode-entanglement by measuring a Clauser-Horne-Shimony-Holt (CHSH) contextuality witness SS defined in the spin and energy subsystems, observing a clear breach of the classical bound of S2|S| \leq 2, obtaining S=2.40±0.02S = 2.40 \pm 0.02. These entangled beams could enable alternative approaches for directly probing dynamics and entanglement in quantum materials whose low-energy excitation scales match those of the incident entangled neutron.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2404.07967,
  title  = {Spin-Energy Entanglement of a Time-Focused Neutron},
  author = {J. C. Leiner and S. J. Kuhn and S. McKay and J. K. Jochum and F. Li and A. A. M. Irfan and F. Funama and D. Mettus and L. Beddrich and C. Franz and J. Shen and S. R. Parnell and R. M. Dalgliesh and M. Loyd and N. Geerits and G. Ortiz and C. Pfleiderer and R. Pynn},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2404.07967},
  year   = {2024}
}

Comments

11 pages, 7 figures