Detection of entanglement between collective spins

Abstract

Entanglement between individual spins can be detected by using thermodynamics quantities as entanglement witnesses. This applies to collective spins also, provided that their internal degrees of freedom are frozen, as in the limit of weakly-coupled nanomagnets. Here, we extend such approach to the detection of entanglement between subsystems of a spin cluster, beyond such weak-coupling limit. The resulting inequalities are violated in spin clusters with different geometries, thus allowing the detection of zero- and finite-temperature entanglement. Under relevant and experimentally verifiable conditions, all the required expectation values can be traced back to correlation functions of individual spins, that are now made selectively available by four-dimensional inelastic neutron scattering.