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Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics Europe & European Quantum Electronics Conference (CLEO/Europe-EQEC)

New Host Lattices for Optical Hole Burning: Materials of Low Nuclear Spin Densities

A. Caprez, P. Meyer, J. Hulliger

Published Jan 1, 1996• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Optical hole burning (OHB) on rare earth ions has so far been performed mainly on single crystals which have been developed as a laser host material. However, an essential drawback of most of these lattices is the high nuclear spin density s of the constituting ions, giving rise to a broadening of the homogeneous width of the absorption of individual rare earth ions [1]. As a result of a limited number of elements providing a high natural abundance of isotopes with zero nuclear spin I or small nuclear momentum µ, there are not too many existing or possible new host lattices to work on. Further restrictions arise in the case of heterogeneous doping as well as from a given site symmetry.

DOI
10.1364/cleo_europe.1996.ctuk66

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Optical hole burning (OHB) on rare earth ions has so far been performed mainly on single crystals which have been developed as a laser host material. However, an essential drawback of most of these lattices is the high nuclear spin density s of the constituting ions, giving rise to a broadening of the homogeneous width of the absorption of individual rare earth ions [1]. As a result of a limited number of elements providing a high natural abundance of isotopes with zero nuclear spin I or small nuclear momentum µ, there are not too many existing or possible new host lattices to work on. Further restrictions arise in the case of heterogeneous doping as well as from a given site symmetry.
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So far, persistent spectral hole-burning (PSHB) phenomenon has been observed in a number of materials. They are molecules in glasses, crystals and polymers, color centers in alkali halide crystals, and rare earth and transition metal ions in glasses and crystals. They are molecular or ionic guests embedded in glass, crystal or polymer hosts. Basic requirements for the PSHB are summarized as follows: (1) The optical absorption of guests embedded in hosts must be broadened inhomogeneously. (2) There must exist more than one ground state configurations of the total system consisting of guests and hosts. (3) The relaxation among the ground states must be slower than the decay rate of any excited state. In fact, this set of requirements is satisfied in many kinds of molecular or ionic guests in hosts, such as glasses, crystals and polymers, at low temperatures. We can naturally understand that guests consisting of small number of atoms are greatly influenced by the surrounding hosts and that the energy levels of the guests are inhomogeneously broadened.
We present the case of photoionization-induced holeburning in rare-earth-doped II–VI compounds for high-density persistent holeburning. In this case, the photoproduct of holeburning is distributed across the entire zero-phonon line. This maximizes the total number of possible spectral holes that can be burned into an inhomogeneous line as well as produces holes that are photoerasable. Experimental data on photon-gated holeburning in MgS:Eu2+, Eu3+ are presented. With the proper choice of the host electronic band structure, the optically active rare-earth ion and its electronic transitions involved in the holeburning process, to the best of our knowledge we have observed the highest number of photon-gated holes ever burned in a single electronic transition. The features of these holes are that they suffer no detectable erasure after several thousands of read cycles, they survive thermal cycling to ∼150 K, and they are completely photoerasable. A special case of photon-gated holeburning, power-gated holeburning, was employed to demonstrate that, in such systems, a single laser can be used for burning, reading, and erasing of the spectral holes.
Persistent spectral hole-burning is extensively studied in many materials. In inorganic materials doped with rare earth ions, we have mainly two mechanisms for hole-burning; one is optical pumping to hyperfine sublevels in rare earth ions, and the other is optically induced rearrangement of local structure around optical centers. In crystals we often observe the hole due to the former mechanism while the hole due to the latter is reported mainly in glasses. Up to now, there seems to be only little study about the correlation between the mechanism of hole-burning and sample-quality or defects. Recently we reported that the character of holes in Y2O3:Pr3+ depends on the quality of samples [1]. In this paper we study the origin of these holes in Y2O3 with a well-controlled manner. For this purpose, we applied hole-burning spectroscopy to various Y2O3:Pr3+(0.2mol%) samples doped with other metallic ions.