Robust Quantum Sensing via Prethermal Spin Orbits

TL;DR

This paper introduces a robust quantum magnetometry method using Floquet prethermalization, enabling high sensitivity and environmental robustness for practical quantum sensing applications.

Contribution

It presents a novel interaction-protected magnetometry scheme leveraging Floquet prethermal states for enhanced robustness against environmental and control perturbations.

Findings

Achieves >1000-fold suppression of background fields

Operates robustly under large bias-field drifts and temperature variations

Demonstrates broadband (0-1 kHz) magnetic sensing in experiments

Abstract

Practical performance of quantum sensors is often curtailed by uncontrolled environmental drift (bias-field instability, temperature fluctuations, mechanical vibration), background fields, and imperfect control pulses. This motivates developing physical mechanisms that intrinsically compensate for such perturbations while retaining high sensitivity to target fields. We introduce an interaction-protected magnetometry scheme where periodic driving steers the collective magnetization onto two long-lived, prethermal Floquet "orbit" axes well-separated on the Bloch sphere. Rapid toggling between these axes encodes target fields as a differential signal, whereas background fields appear as common-mode motion that is strongly rejected, achieving >1000-fold suppression while canceling prethermal transients. This enables accurate reconstruction of rapidly varying audio-band magnetic signals without predictive filtering or spectral tuning. We provide an experimental proof-of-principle using a dense ensemble of coupled nuclear spins, operated here as a broadband (0-1 kHz) magnetometer. The protocol is remarkably tolerant to imperfections, operating robustly across millions of pulses under pulse-angle (~10{\deg}) and pulse frequency (>1 kHz) errors, large bias-field drifts (>50 $\mathrm{\mu}$T), temperature variations over 150 K, and harsh mechanical vibrations. These results establish Floquet prethermalization as a resource for robust quantum sensors that combines broadband magnetic-field sensitivity with intrinsic immunity to diverse environmental and control perturbations, opening a path toward stable quantum metrology beyond controlled laboratory conditions.