Investigation of the Leggett-Garg inequality for precessing nuclear spins

Vikram Athalye*, Soumya Singha Roy, T. S. Mahesh

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

We report experimental implementation of a protocol for testing the Leggett-Garg inequality (LGI) for nuclear spins precessing in an external magnetic field. The implementation involves certain controlled operations, performed in parallel on pairs of spin-1/2 nuclei (target and probe) from molecules of a nuclear magnetic resonance ensemble, which enable evaluation of temporal correlations from an LG string. Our experiment demonstrates violation of the LGI for time intervals between successive measurements, over which the effects of relaxation on the quantum state of target spin are negligible. Further, it is observed that the temporal correlations decay, and the same target spin appears to display macrorealistic behavior consistent with LGI.

Original languageEnglish
Article number130402
JournalPhysical Review Letters
Volume107
Issue number13
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 19 Sep 2011

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