Perturbation independent decay of the Loschmidt Echo in a Many-Body System

Abstract

When a qubit or spin interacts with others under a many-body Hamiltonian, the information it contains progressively scrambles. Here, nuclear spins of an adamantane crystal are used as a quantum simulator to monitor such dynamics through out-of-time-order correlators, while a Loschmidt echo (LE) asses how weak perturbations degrade the information encoded in these increasingly complex states. Both observables involve the implementation of a time-reversal procedure which, in practice, involves inverting the sign of the effective Hamiltonian. Our protocols use periodic radio frequency pulses to modulate the natural dipolar interaction implementing a Hamiltonian that can be scaled down at will. Meanwhile, experimental errors and strength of perturbative terms remain constant and can be quantified through the LE. For each scaling factor, information spreading occurs with a timescale, T2, inversely proportional to the local second moment of the Hamiltonian. We find that, when the reversible interactions dominate over the perturbations, the information scrambled among up to 102 spins can still be recovered. However, we find that the LE decay rate cannot become smaller than a critical value 1/T3≈(0.15±0.02)/T2, which only depends on the interactions themselves, and not on the perturbations. This result shows the emergence of a regime of intrinsic irreversibility in accordance to a central hypothesis of irreversibility, hinted from previous experiments.