Universal dynamics of quantum spin decoherence in a nuclear spin bath

Abstract

We systematically investigate the universal spin decoherence dynamics of a localized electron in an arbitrary nuclear spin bath, which can even be far away from equilibrium due to the weak nuclear-lattice interaction. We show that the electron spin relaxation dynamics (as well as spin pure dephasing and Hahn echo decay) can always have a universal behavior as long as the initial state is composed of a sufficiently large amount of spin eigenstates. For a given system, the pattern of the universal dynamics depends on the complicated initial condition only via a single parameter, which measures the amount of phase coherence between different spin eigenstates in the initial state. Our results apply even when the number of the involved nuclei is not large and, therefore, provide a solid foundation in the comparison of the theoretical/numerical results to the experimental measurement. As an example, we also show the numerical results for systems of noninteracting spin bath in a zero magnetic field regime and discuss the features of universal decoherent dynamics.