Description:

Professor Christian Enss, Heidelberg University

Title: Interplay of Nuclear Spins and Atomic Tunneling Systems

Abstract: The investigation of non-equilibrium disordered quantum systems with novel experimental techniques have resulted in fundamentally new insights of their dynamics. In particular, the importance of nuclear spins as surprisingly active degrees of freedom at ultra-low temperatures has been revealed in recent measurements on amorphous solids. These new findings are potentially of high relevance to many quantum devices, like quantum dots, qubits, SQUIDs, nanomechanical systems and quantum limited amplifiers. We present the experimental evidence for a nuclear spin driven dynamics in non-equilibrium disordered quantum systems and discuss a possible theoretical framework for such a mechanism. The new experimental results also show that the universality of glasses is limited to certain temperatures and properties.

Host: Jim Sauls