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Nature Photonics

Coherent manipulation, measurement and entanglement of individual solid-state spins using optical fields

Weibo Gao, Ataç İmamoğlu, Hannes Bernien, Ronald Hanson

Published May 28, 2015• 274 citations
Publisher
DOI
10.1038/nphoton.2015.58

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The study of individual quantum systems in solids, for use as quantum bits (qubits) and probes of decoherence, requires protocols for their initialization, unitary manipulation, and readout. In many solid-state quantum systems, these operations rely on disparate techniques that can vary widely depending on the particular qubit structure. One such qubit, the nitrogen-vacancy (NV) center spin in diamond, can be initialized and read out through its special spin-selective intersystem crossing, while microwave electron spin resonance techniques provide unitary spin rotations. Instead, we demonstrate an alternative, fully optical approach to these control protocols in an NV center that does not rely on its intersystem crossing. By tuning an NV center to an excited-state spin anticrossing at cryogenic temperatures, we use coherent population trapping and stimulated Raman techniques to realize initialization, readout, and unitary manipulation of a single spin. Each of these techniques can be performed directly along any arbitrarily chosen quantum basis, removing the need for extra control steps to map the spin to and from a preferred basis. Combining these protocols, we perform measurements of the NV center's spin coherence, a demonstration of this full optical control. Consisting solely of optical pulses, these techniques enable control within a smaller footprint and within photonic networks. Likewise, this unified approach obviates the need for both electron spin resonance manipulation and spin addressability through the intersystem crossing. This method could therefore be applied to a wide range of potential solid-state qubits, including those which currently lack a means to be addressed.
The inhomogeneity of an electron spin ensemble as well as fluctuating environment acting upon individual spins drastically shorten the spin coherence time T_{2} and hinder coherent spin manipulation. We show that this problem can be solved by the simultaneous application of a radio frequency (rf) field, which stimulates coherent spin precession decoupled from an inhomogeneous environment, and periodic optical pulses, which amplify this precession. The resulting resonance, taking place when the rf field frequency approaches the laser pulse repetition frequency, has a width determined by the spin coherence time T_{2} that is free from the effects of inhomogeneity and slow nuclear spin fluctuations. We measure a 50-Hz-narrow electron spin resonance and milliseconds-long T_{2} for electrons in the ground state of Ce^{3+} ions in the yttrium aluminum garnet (YAG) lattice at low temperatures, while the inhomogeneous spin dephasing time T_{2}^{*} is only 25 ns. This study paves the way to coherent optical manipulation in spin systems decoupled from their inhomogeneous environment.