Long-lived states with well-defined spins in spin-1/2 homogeneous Bose gases

Many-body eigenfunctions of the total spin operator can be constructed from the spin and spatial wave functions with nontrivial permutation symmetries. Spin-dependent interactions can lead to relaxation of the spin eigenstates to the thermal equilibrium. A mechanism that stabilizes the many-body entangled states is proposed here. Surprisingly, despite coupling with the chaotic motion of the spatial degrees of freedom, the spin relaxations can be suppressed by destructive quantum interference due to spherical vector and tensor terms of the spin-dependent interactions. Tuning the scattering lengths by the method of Feshbach resonances, readily available in cold atomic laboratories, can enhance the relaxation time scales by several orders of magnitude.