Suspended Long-Lived NMR Echo in Solids

We report an observation of extremely long-lived spin states in systems of dipolar-coupled nuclear spins in solids. The 'suspended echo' experiment uses a simple stimulated echo pulse sequence and creates non-equilibrium states which live many orders of magnitude longer than the characteristic time of spin-spin dynamics T2. Large amounts of information can be encoded in such long-lived states, stored in a form of multi-spin correlations, and subsequently retrieved by an application of a single 'reading' pulse.