We put forth, theoretically and experimentally, the possibility of drastically cooling down (purifying) thermal ensembles (baths) of solid-state spins via a sequence of projective measurements of a probe spin that couples to the bath in an arbitrary fashion. If the measurement intervals are chosen to correspond to the anti-Zeno regime of the probe-bath exchange, then a short sequence of measurements with selected outcomes is found to have an appreciable success probability. Such a sequence is shown to condition the bath evolution so that it can dramatically enhance the bath-state purity and yield a low-entropy steady state of the bath. This purified bath state persists after the measurements and can be chosen, on-demand, to allow for Zeno- or anti-Zeno- like evolution of quantum systems coupled to the purified bath. The experimental setup for observing these effects consists of a Nitrogen Vacancy (NV) center in diamond at low temperature that acts as a probe of the surrounding nuclear spin bath. The NV single-shot measurements are induced by optical fields at microsecond intervals.
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