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Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE

Homogeneous linewidths in Er 3+ -doped glasses measured by resonance fluorescence line narrowing

Stanley A. Zemon, Gary M. Lambert, William J. Miniscalco, Barbara A. Thompson

Published Feb 1, 1992• 3 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Resonance-fluorescence-line-narrowing studies have been performed on a representative group of Er3+ -doped glasses for excitation in both the 1530 and 980-nm bands at 4.2, 77, 200, and 300 K. Fluorozirconate, fluorophosphate, phosphate, silicate, Ge/P-doped and A1/P-doped silica preforms, and Al/P-doped and Ge-doped fibers were examined. At 77 K the homogeneous linewidths were found to be relatively insensitive to composition. In particular, they vary from 1.4 to 1.8 cm-1 for the different hosts using excitation at 1531 nm. At 300 K weak resonant features were observed in most samples, consistent with a small inhomogeneous contribution to a predominantly homogeneous fluorescence emission.

DOI
10.1117/12.134974

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Resonance-fluorescence-line-narrowing studies have been performed on a representative group of Er3+ -doped glasses for excitation in both the 1530 and 980-nm bands at 4.2, 77, 200, and 300 K. Fluorozirconate, fluorophosphate, phosphate, silicate, Ge/P-doped and A1/P-doped silica preforms, and Al/P-doped and Ge-doped fibers were examined. At 77 K the homogeneous linewidths were found to be relatively insensitive to composition. In particular, they vary from 1.4 to 1.8 cm-1 for the different hosts using excitation at 1531 nm. At 300 K weak resonant features were observed in most samples, consistent with a small inhomogeneous contribution to a predominantly homogeneous fluorescence emission.
Homogeneous and inhomogeneous spectral linewidths of the ${(}^{2}{F}_{5/2}{)}_{1}\ensuremath{-}{(}^{2}{F}_{7/2}{)}_{1}$ transition in Yb3+{\mathrm{Yb}}^{3+}Yb3+-doped fluorozirconate glasses are determined by fitting Voigt profiles to the inhomogeneously broadened emission and absorption spectra between 10 and 300 K. The homogeneous linewidth varied as $(12\ifmmode\pm\else\textpm\fi{}2)\ifmmode\times\else\texttimes\fi{}{T}^{(1.9\ifmmode\pm\else\textpm\fi{}0.1)}\mathrm{MHz}$ for emission and $(10\ifmmode\pm\else\textpm\fi{}1)\ifmmode\times\else\texttimes\fi{}{T}^{1.9\ifmmode\pm\else\textpm\fi{}0.1}$ for absorption over the entire temperature range, similar to that of other rare-earth-doped systems previously studied by fluorescence line narrowing and photon echoes. The inhomogeneous linewidths were nearly independent of temperature, but different by $\ensuremath{\sim}30%$ between emission and absorption. The structural and dynamic properties in this disordered system are discussed.
Germanosilicate glass shows inhomogeneous saturation behavior,1 whereas aluminogermanosilicate glass shows homogeneous behavior.2 Zemon et al.3 have published a study of nonresonant fluorescence line narrowing (FLN), but their spectra show little evidence of significant spectral narrowing by site selection. Spectral hole-burning spectroscopy has been applied by Desurvire et al.4 on Er3+ in aluminosilicate fiber. They extracted an inhomogeneous linewidth Γin of 12.5 nm and a homogeneous linewidth Γh of 115 nm.
We have measured the homogeneous linewidth of the 2F5/2^{2}\mathrm{F}_{5/2}2F5/2​(1)${\mathrm{\ensuremath{-}}}^{2}$F7/2{\mathrm{F}}_{7/2}F7/2​(1) transition of Yb3+{\mathrm{Yb}}^{3+}Yb3+ in silicate and phosphate glasses using fluorescence line narrowing between 6.5 and 70 K. The linewidth is observed to vary as ${T}^{1.9\ifmmode\pm\else\textpm\fi{}0.1}$ at high temperature, changing to ${T}^{1.3\ifmmode\pm\else\textpm\fi{}0.1}$ below 40 K. This behavior is compared to that observed in other systems and examined in light of current theories of dephasing in disordered systems.
Erbium-doped solids are promising candidates for fiber-based quantum networks due to their emission wavelength, which aligns with the telecom band over which optical fibers exhibit minimal loss. Among these, erbium-doped silica fiber (EDF) stands out for its availability, ease of use, and seamless integration with existing fiber-optic infrastructure. In this work, using the two-pulse photon-echo (2PPE) technique, we measured the homogeneous linewidth of the 4 I 13/2 ↔ 4 I 15/2 optical transition under varying magnetic fields and temperatures. We observed an effective homogeneous linewidth of approximately 8 kHz at ∼7mK at an optimal magnetic field of 0.09 T, representing over two orders of magnitude improvement compared to earlier reports measured at T ≈700mK. We also present a comprehensive model for the combined magnetic field and temperature dependency of the effective homogeneous linewidth. Additionally, we employed three-pulse photon-echo (3PPE) measurements to investigate spectral diffusion and decoherence processes and conclude that Two-Level System (TLS) effects are significantly suppressed at sufficiently low temperatures, below ∼100mK.
Rapid development of optical fiber amplifiers, and more especially of the erbium-doped fiber amplifiers (EDFA) during the last decade, has benefited from extensive work on the configuration of the system itself: determination of pump wavelength, pumping configuration, improvement of noise performance, etc. However, less effort have been dedicated to study the interaction that influences the spectral profile of the gain bandwidth and particularly the relation between the glass composition and the spectroscopy of erbium. Here, we report a systematic determination of key parameters responsible for the global profile of the gain bandwidth: stark splitting, homogeneous broadening, and inhomogeneous broadening. The correlation between these parameters and the glass structure from one part and the behavior of the EDFA in amplification regime from another part is discussed. The quasiregular crystal-field splitting of tellurite and fluoride glasses is found to correlate well with the flatness of the gain profile. Moreover, the low-temperature homogeneous bandwidths extrapolated to room temperature can be correlated to the saturation spectral hole widths measured in the amplification regime.
We measured the optical decoherence times T2, or, equivalently, the homogeneous line width, in an Er-doped optical fiber at low temperature as a function of external magnetic field and temperature using two-pulse photon echoes. The decoherence times were up to 230 ns at fields above 3 T. The magnitude of the line narrowing induced by a magnetic field of 3 T is 2.5 MHz, which is anomalously large compared to that typical for oxide crystals with similar Er3+ concentration. This is interpreted as evidence for dephasing by coupled spin-elastic tunneling modes where the normal glass tunneling modes acquire a magnetic character by coupling to the Er3+ spin.