Revealing the Emergence of Classicality Using Nitrogen-Vacancy Centers

Abstract

The origin of classical reality in our quantum world is a long-standing mystery. Here, we examine a nitrogen-vacancy center in diamond evolving in the presence of its magnetic nuclear spin environment which is formed by the natural appearance of carbon ^{13}C atoms in the diamond lattice, to study quantum Darwinism-the proliferation of information about preferred quantum states throughout the world via the environment. This redundantly imprinted information accounts for the perception of objective reality, as it is independently accessible by many without perturbing the system of interest. To observe this process, we implement a novel dynamical decoupling scheme that enables the measurement and control of several nuclear spins (the environment E) interacting with a nitrogen vacancy (the system S). Our experiment demonstrates that, in the course of the decoherence of S, redundant information is indeed imprinted onto E, giving rise to incipient classical objectivity-a consensus recorded in redundant copies, and available from the fragments of the nuclear spin environment E, about the state of S. This provides the first laboratory verification of the process responsible for the emergence of the objective classical world from the underlying quantum substrate.