1Hefei National Laboratory for Physical Sciences at the Microscale and Department of Modern Physics, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei 230026 2Synergetic Innovation Center of Quantum Information and Quantum Physics, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei 230026 3High Magnetic Field Laboratory, Hefei Institutes of Physical Science, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Hefei 230031
Abstract:The geometric phase has become a fundamental concept in many fields of physics since it was revealed. Recently, the study of the geometric phase has attracted considerable attention in the context of quantum phase transition, where the ground state properties of the system experience a dramatic change induced by a variation of an external parameter. In this work, we experimentally measure the ground-state geometric phase of the three-spin $XY$ model by utilizing the nuclear magnetic resonance technique. The experimental results indicate that the geometric phase could be used as a fingerprint of the ground-state quantum phase transition of many-body systems.