Estimation of coupling constants of a three-spin chain: a case study of Hamiltonian tomography with nuclear magnetic resonance

Abstract

It has been shown that inter-spin interaction strengths in a spin-1/2 chain can be evaluated by accessing one of the edge spins only. We demonstrate this experimentally for the simplest case, a three-spin chain, with the nuclear magnetic resonance technique. The three spins in the chain interact through nearest-neighbor Ising interactions under site-dependent transverse fields. The employed molecule is an alanine containing three 13C nuclei, each of which has spin-1/2.