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Journal of Physics Conference Series

An advanced lifetime measurement method by square wave excitation and lock-in amplifier

M. Mustafa Çodur, Selçuk Yerci

Published May 1, 2021• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Abstract Achieving the radiation decay rate with high accuracy is crucial for all light emitters and absorbers. Therefore, a wide variety of measurement approaches have been developed for the measurement of radiation decay rate. Herein, we introduce a method to measure the decay rate with a common photoluminescence intensity setup without any modification. The square wave created by simply turning the output of the laser on and off is used as the excitation waveform, and a lock-in amplifier is used to gather the detected signal, making it a cost-effective way. Moreover, the constructed method can be used in a wide range of frequencies, detection voltages, and lifetimes. Finally, we applied the derived method to measure the photoluminescence lifetime of the first excited state of erbium ions in upconverting erbium-ytterbium silicate samples.

DOI
10.1088/1742-6596/1919/1/012009

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Abstract Achieving the radiation decay rate with high accuracy is crucial for all light emitters and absorbers. Therefore, a wide variety of measurement approaches have been developed for the measurement of radiation decay rate. Herein, we introduce a method to measure the decay rate with a common photoluminescence intensity setup without any modification. The square wave created by simply turning the output of the laser on and off is used as the excitation waveform, and a lock-in amplifier is used to gather the detected signal, making it a cost-effective way. Moreover, the constructed method can be used in a wide range of frequencies, detection voltages, and lifetimes. Finally, we applied the derived method to measure the photoluminescence lifetime of the first excited state of erbium ions in upconverting erbium-ytterbium silicate samples.
Lifetimes of metastable levels of chromium in ruby are determined using an unusual technique. The fluorescence from the chromium is measured using an ac technique in which the excitation is modulated and the fluorescence is detected synchronously. The novelty lies in the measurement of the dependence of the signal on the modulation frequency and extracting the lifetime from the frequency dependence. The experiments and data analysis demand a detailed understanding of the methods of lock-in amplification and synchronous detection and hence they can serve as a useful primer on the subject. The observed values for the lifetimes show excellent agreement with previous measurements.
Radiation trapping causes significant lengthening of the measured fluorescence lifetimes in solid samples, which leads to overestimating them. Self-absorption inside solid-state samples is considerably enhanced by successive total internal reflections at the sample/air interface. A simple method for quantitative estimation of radiation trapping in solid-state materials within the frame of the Holstein-Biberman equations is presented. This method is based on the assumption that the radiation propagation follows paths with many total internal reflections; it can be applied to many resonant two-level systems such as Er3+{\mathrm{Er}}^{3+}Er3+-, Yb3+{\mathrm{Yb}}^{3+}Yb3+-, or Ho3+{\mathrm{Ho}}^{3+}Ho3+-doped materials. The equations are solved for a pulsed excitation localized in a finite volume inside the sample. In our modeling approach, we take into account the initial geometric population distribution and the imaging setup. We derive analytical expressions of the measured decays, which give the deformation of the measured curves compared with the ideal exponential decay. We investigate the effect of the fraction of self-trapped light on the decay modification. We then show that the ratio between the pumping volume, the collected volume, and the sample dimension changes the measured decay significantly.
Abstract We report a method with high time resolution to measure the excited-state lifetime of silicon vacancy centers in bulk diamond avoiding timing jitter from the single-photon detectors. Frequency upconversion of the fluorescence emitted from silicon vacancy centers was achieved from 738 nm to 436 nm via sum frequency generation with a short pump pulse. The excited-state lifetime can be obtained by measuring the intensity of upconverted light while the pump delay changes. As a probe, a pump laser with pulse duration of 11 ps provided a high temporal resolution of the measurement. The lifetime extracted from the pump–probe curve was 0.755 ns, which was comparable to the timing jitter of the single-photon detectors.
A transform-limited light pulse from a tunable laser can be used to measure atomic lifetimes much shorter or much longer than the light puke duration by measuring linewidths in the case of short lifetimes or decay rates in the case of long lifetimes. However, when the atomic lifetime is comparable to the duration of the exciting pulse, these methods are difficult to apply. We demonstrate that, for the latter case, an optical nutation measurement yields both lifetimes and transition strengths with high accuracy. We prepare oxygen atoms in a single angular momentum state (J, mj) in a collision-free and Doppler-free environment.
We have measured the atomic lifetime of the argon 2 p 4 level by the laser-induced-fluorescence spectroscopy to be 30.5 ns. This contradicts the recent measurement using the high-frequency plused electron-beam excitation. We conjecture that, in their experiment, the radiation trapping not only affects the decay of the upper-level population but also relaxes the alignment initially produced by the electron-collision excitation in the upper-level population. Thus, the directly observed decay of the emission-line intensity is different from the decay of the upper-level population. We have observed the radiative relaxation of alignment on the neon 2 p 2 level which is a complementary effect to coherence narrowing.
Quantum state lifetimes T_{2}, or equivalently homogeneous linewidths Γ_{h}=1/πT_{2}, are a key parameter for understanding decoherence processes in quantum systems and assessing their potential for applications in quantum technologies. The most common tool for measuring narrow optical homogeneous linewidths, i.e., long T_{2}, is the measurement of coherent photon echo emissions, which however gives very weak signal when the number of emitters is small. This strongly hampers the development of nanomaterials, such as those based on rare earth ions, for quantum communication and processing. In this work, we propose, and demonstrate in an erbium doped crystal, a measurement of photon echoes based on incoherent fluorescence detection and its variance analysis. It gives access to T_{2} through a much larger signal than direct photon echo detection, and, importantly, with a laser which is incoherent over the measurement timescale, on the order of a few T_{2}. Our results thus open the way to efficiently assess the properties of a broad range of emitters and materials for applications in quantum nanophotonics.