Certifying entanglement of spins on surfaces using ESR-STM

Abstract

We propose a protocol to certify the presence of entanglement in artificial on-surface atomic and molecular spin arrays using electron spin resonance carried by scanning tunnel microscopes (ESR-STM). We first generalize the theorem that relates global spin susceptibility as an entanglement witness to the case of anisotropic Zeeman interactions, relevant for surfaces. We then propose a method to measure the spin susceptibilities of surface-spin arrays combining ESR-STM with atomic manipulation. Our calculations show that entanglement can be certified in antiferromagnetically coupled spin dimers and trimers with state of the art ESR-STM magnetometry.