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Recent electron spin resonance experiments on CaWO$_4$:Gd$^{3+}$ and on other magnetic impurities have demonstrated that sustained Rabi oscillations can be created by driving a magnetic moment with a microwave field frequency slightly larger than the Larmor frequency and tuned to the Floquet resonance together with another microwave field (image drive). These observations are confirmed by the new experimental results reported in this paper. We investigate several mechanisms of decoherence and dissipation by using a combination of numerical and analytical techniques. The first microscopic model describes a magnetic moment in external magnetic fields, interacting with a bath of two-level systems acting as a source of decoherence and dissipation. The second model describes a collection of the identical, interacting magnetics moments, all subject to the same magnetic fields. In this case, the many-body interactions causes a decay of the Rabi oscillations. In addition, we also study the effect of the inhomogeneity of the microwave radiation on the decay of the Rabi oscillations. Our simulation results show that the dynamics of a magnetic moment subject to the two microwave fields with different frequencies and in contact with an environment is highly nontrivial. We show that under appropriate conditions, and in particular at the Floquet resonance, the magnetization exhibits sustained Rabi oscillations, in some cases with additional beatings. Although these two microscopic models separately describe the experimental data well, a simulation study that simultaneously accounts for both types of interactions is currently prohibitively costly. To gain further insight into the microscopic dynamics of these two different models, we study the time dependence of the bath and system energy and of the correlations of the spins, data that is not readily accessible experimentally.

In the theory of antiferromagnetism, the staggered field---an external magnetic field that alternates in sign on atomic length scales---is used to select the classical N\'eel state from a quantum magnet, but justification is missing. This work examines, within the decoherence framework, whether repeated $local$ measurement can replace a staggered field. Accordingly, the conditions under which local decoherence can be considered a continuous measurement are studied. The dynamics of a small magnetic system is analysed to illustrate that local decoherence can lead to (symmetry-broken) order similar to order resulting from a staggered field.

We study the decoherence process of a four spin-1/2 antiferromagnet that is coupled to an environment of spin-1/2 particles. The preferred basis of the antiferromagnet is discussed in two limiting cases and we identify two $\it{exact}$ pointer states. Decoherence near the two limits is examined whereby entropy is used to quantify the $\it{robustness}$ of states against environmental coupling. We find that close to the quantum measurement limit, the self-Hamiltonian of the system of interest can become dynamically relevant on macroscopic timescales. We illustrate this point by explicitly constructing a state that is more robust than (generic) states diagonal in the system-environment interaction Hamiltonian., Comment: 21 pages

We present a systematic study of the electronic, transport and optical properties of disordered graphene including the next-nearest-neighbor hopping. We show that this hopping has a non-negligible effect on resonant scattering but is of minor importance for long-range disorder such as charged impurities, random potentials or hoppings induced by strain fluctuations. Different types of disorders can be recognized by their fingerprints appearing in the profiles of dc conductivity, carrier mobility, optical spectroscopy and Landau level spectrum. The minimum conductivity $4e^{2}/h$ found in the experiments is dominated by long-range disorder and the value of $4e^{2}/\pi h$ is due to resonant scatterers only., Comment: 9 pages, 7 figures, 1 table

We have developed a fully microscopic theory of magnetic properties of the prototype molecular magnet Mn12. First, the intra-molecular magnetic properties have been studied by means of first-principles density functional-based methods, with local correlation effects being taken into account within the local density approximation plus U (LDA+U) approach. Using the magnetic force theorem, we have calculated the interatomic isotropic and anisotropic exchange interactions and full tensors of single-ion anisotropy for each Mn ion. Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya (DM) interaction parameters turned out to be unusually large, reflecting a low symmetry of magnetic pairs in molecules, in comparison with bulk crystals. Based on these results we predict a distortion of ferrimagnetic ordering due to DM interactions. Further, we use an exact diagonalization approach allowing to work with as large Hilbert space dimension as 10^8 without any particular symmetry (the case of the constructed magnetic model). Based on the computational results for the excitation spectrum, we propose a distinct interpretation of the experimental inelastic neutron scattering spectra., Comment: 8 pages, 2 figures. To appear in Physical Review B

We study the quantum dynamics of a spin ensemble coupled to cavity photons. Recently, related experimental results have been reported, showing the existence of the strong coupling regime in such systems. We study the eigenenergy distribution of the multi-spin system (following the Tavis-Cummings model) which shows a peculiar structure as a function of the number of cavity photons and of spins. We study how this structure causes changes in the spectrum of the admittance in the linear response theory, and also the frequency dependence of the excited quantities in the stationary state under a probing field. In particular, we investigate how the structure of the higher excited energy levels changes the spectrum from a double-peak structure (the so-called vacuum field Rabi splitting) to a single peak structure. We also point out that the spin dynamics in the region of the double-peak structure corresponds to recent experiments using cavity ringing while in region of the single peak structure, it corresponds to the coherent Rabi oscillation in a driving electromagnetic filed. Using a standard Lindblad type mechanism, we study the effect of dissipations on the line width and separation in the computed spectra. In particular, we study the relaxation of the total spin in the general case of a spin ensemble in which the total spin of the system is not specified. The theoretical results are correlated with experimental evidence of the strong coupling regime, achieved with a spin 1/2 ensemble.

Electron Paramagnetic Resonance experiments show that the decay of Rabi oscillations of ensembles of spin qubits depends noticeably on the microwave power and more precisely on the Rabi frequency, an effect recently called "driven decoherence". By direct numerical solution of the time-dependent Schr\"odinger equation of the associated many-body system, we scrutinize the different mechanisms that may lead to this type of decoherence. Assuming the effects of dissipation to be negligible ($T_1=\infty$), it is shown that a system of dipolar-coupled spins with -- even weak-- random inhomogeneities is sufficient to explain the salient features of the experimental observations. Some experimental examples are given to illustrate the potential of the numerical simulation approach., Comment: Accepted for publication in Physical Review B

Motivated by recent experimental observations of size quantization of electron energy levels in graphene quantum dots \cite{ponomarenko} we investigate the level statistics in the simplest tight-binding model for different dot shapes by computer simulation. The results are in a reasonable agreement with the experiment which confirms qualitatively interpretation of observed level statistics in terms of "Dirac billiards" without taking into account many-body effects. It is shown that edge effects are in general sufficient to produce the observed level distribution and that even strong bulk disorder does not change the results drastically., Comment: Published: Pis'ma v ZhETF, vol. 88, iss. 9, pp. 698 -- 701 (2008)

We demonstrate that decoherence of many-spin systems can drastically differ from decoherence of single-spin systems. The difference originates at the most basic level, being determined by parity of the central system, i.e. by whether the system comprises even or odd number of spin-1/2 entities. Therefore, it is very likely that similar distinction between the central spin systems of even and odd parity is important in many other situations. Our consideration clarifies the physical origin of the unusual two-step decoherence found previously in the two-spin systems., Comment: RevTeX 4, 5 pages, 2 figures; acknowledgments added; replaced with the published version; journal reference added

We show that the local spin measurement which decoheres the localized spin in a Kondo system, suppresses the Abrikosov-Suhl resonance and destroys the Kondo effect. This happens due to elimination of the entanglement between the localized spin and the conduction electrons, and differs essentially from smearing of the resonance by dissipation. Considering decoherence by a spin bath, we predict that the Kondo effect disappears when the Kondo temperature becomes smaller than the coupling with a bath. This effect can be detected in experiments on ``quantum corrals'' or quantum dots doped by impurities with internal degrees of freedom., Comment: REVTeX4, 1 figure (EPS)

We calculate the tunneling splittings in a Mn$_{12}$ magnetic molecule taking into account its internal many-spin structure. We discuss the precision and reliability of these calculations and show that restricting the basis (limiting the number of excitations taken into account) may lead to significant error (orders of magnitude) in the resulting tunneling splittings for the lowest energy levels, so that an intuitive picture of different decoupled energy scales does not hold in this case. Possible routes for further development of the many-spin model of Mn$_{12}$ are discussed., Comment: REVTeX4, 5 pages, 1 figure (PostScript). Version 2, substantially revised