Experimental Observation of the Ground-State Geometric Phase of Three-Spin XY Model

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.