Measurement of the magnetic interaction between two electrons

Abstract

Electrons have an intrinsic, indivisible, magnetic dipole aligned with their internal angular momentum (spin). The magnetic interaction between two electrons can therefore impose a change in their spin orientation. This process, however, was never observed in experiment. The challenge is two-fold. At the atomic scale, where the coupling is relatively large, the magnetic interaction is often overshadowed by the much larger coulomb exchange counterpart. In typical situations where exchange is negligible, magnetic interactions are also very weak and well below ambient magnetic noise. Here we report on the first measurement of the magnetic interaction between two electronic spins. To this end, we used the ground state valence electrons of two $^{88}$Sr$^+$ ions, co-trapped in an electric Paul trap and separated by more than two micrometers. We measured the weak, millihertz scale (alternatively $10^{-18}$ eV or $10^{-14}$ K), magnetic interaction between their electronic spins. This, in the presence of magnetic noise that was six orders of magnitude larger than the respective magnetic fields the electrons apply on each other. Cooperative spin dynamics was kept coherent for 15 s during which spin-entanglement was generated. The sensitivity necessary for this measurement was provided by restricting the spin evolution to a Decoherence-Free Subspace (DFS) which is immune to collective magnetic field noise. Finally, by varying the separation between the two ions, we were able to recover the inverse cubic distance dependence of the interaction. The reported method suggests an alternative route to the search of long-range anomalous spin-spin forces and can be generalized to include Quantum Error Correction codes for other cases of extremely weak signal detection.