Long-time Behavior of Nuclear Spin Decays in Various Lattices

TL;DR

This study investigates the universal long-time behavior of nuclear spin decays across different materials and isotopic concentrations, confirming theoretical predictions of microscopic chaos influencing these decays.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive experimental survey of long-time nuclear spin decay universality in various lattices, extending previous findings and verifying theoretical models.

Findings

Universal long-time decay behavior observed in multiple systems

Decay parameters are unique for each lattice type

Experimental results support microscopic chaos theory

Abstract

The transverse nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) decays of $^{129}$Xe in polycrystalline xenon were recently shown to have a universal property: in the long-time regime these decays all converge to the same sinusoidally modulated exponential function irrespective of the initial transverse spin configuration prepared by a sequence of one or more radio frequency pulses. The present work constitutes a more comprehensive survey of this phenomenon. It examines transverse decays for several different isotopic concentrations of $^{129}$Xe, employs additional pulse sequences, and performs similar measurements in a different material: $^{19}$F in single-crystal and polycrystalline CaF$_2$. We additionally verified the polycrystalline nature of our frozen xenon samples by X-ray diffraction measurements. With the possible exception of polycrystalline CaF$_2$ where the observation of the long-time behavior is limited by the experimental resolution, all these systems display the long-time universal behavior characterized by particular values of the exponential decay coefficient and beat frequency that were unique for each lattice. This behavior has been theoretically predicted based on the notion of microscopic chaos.