Experimental Detection of the Correlation Rényi Entropy in the Central Spin Model

Abstract: We propose and experimentally measure an entropy that quantifies the volume of correlations among qubits. The experiment is carried out on a nearly isolated quantum system composed of a central spin coupled and initially uncorrelated with 15 other spins. Due to the spin-spin interactions, information flows from the central spin to the surrounding ones forming clusters of multi-spin correlations that grow in time. We design a nuclear magnetic resonance experiment that directly measures the amplitudes of the multi-spin correlations and use them to compute the evolution of what we call correlation R\'enyi entropy. This entropy keeps growing even after the equilibration of the entanglement entropy. We also analyze how the saturation point and the timescale for the equilibration of the correlation R\'enyi entropy depend on the system size.