Laser-induced-fluorescence-band-narrowing and time-resolved-spectroscopy techniques are extended to measure the inequivalent sites in the spectroscopic properties of
3P1 and
3P0 excited states of the
Bi3+ ion in germanate glass. Under excitation of the
3P1 components, at 4 K, the analysis of the $^{3}P_{0}\ensuremath{\rightarrow}^{1}S_{0}$ unsplit fluorescence band is particularly useful to probe the large site-to-site variations in the glass. The spectral dependence of the lifetime, the temporal evolution of the bandwidth under laser excitation, the red shift of both $^{3}P_{1}\ensuremath{\rightleftarrows}^{1}S_{0}$ and $^{3}P_{0}\ensuremath{\rightarrow}^{1}S_{0}$ transitions and the strong intensity of the forbidden $^{3}P_{0}\ensuremath{\rightarrow}^{1}S_{0}$ transition are discussed. These experiments measure, indeed, the degree of inhomogeneity of
Bi3+-doped germanate with a broadband ion for the first time.
We demonstrate a general method for state detection of trapped ions that can be applied to a large class of atomic and molecular species. We couple a spectroscopy ion (27Al+) to a control ion (25Mg+) in the same trap and perform state detection through off-resonant laser excitation of the spectroscopy ion that induces coherent motion. The motional amplitude, dependent on the spectroscopy ion state, is measured either by time-resolved photon counting or by resolved sideband excitations on the control ion. The first method provides a simplified way to distinguish clock states in 27Al+, which avoids ground-state cooling and sideband transitions. The second method reduces spontaneous emission and optical pumping on the spectroscopy ion, which we demonstrate by nondestructively distinguishing Zeeman sublevels in the (1)S0 ground state of 27Al+.