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International Conference on Luminescence - 1984

Two-Center Optical Transitions in Condensed Matter

Michael Stavola

Published Jan 1, 1984• 1 citation
Publisher

Abstract

The absorption of a single photon by the simultaneous excitation of two rare-earth ions was first reported by Varsanyi and Dieke in 1961.1 D. L. Dexter explained this unusual observation by including the electron-electron interactions (that also give rise to energy transfer) between the rare earth ions with perturbation theory.2 In the 70's Dexter became interested in electronic-vibrational coupling. A theory of two-center optical transitions was developed for a rare-earth ion weakly coupled to a high energy, internal vibrational mode of a near-lying ion.3 Using theoretical techniques that had been developed for rare-earth ion pairs, intensities and selection rules could be determined.

DOI
10.1364/icol.1984.ff2

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The absorption of single photons by coupled pairs of ions in rare-earth solids was first observed by Varsanyi and Dieke.1 They noticed that weak absorption of light occurred in PrCl3 at frequencies close to the sum of transition frequencies of individual Pr ions, giving rise to rare-earth fluorescence. This effect was explained by the perturbation theory of Dexter.2 He showed that weak multipole or exchange interactions between rare-earth ions permitted the simultaneous promotion of two ions to excited states by the action of one absorbed photon in an electric dipole allowed transition. Similarly, two ions initially in excited states could emit one sum frequency photon in a cooperative manner.

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Light-matter interaction at single quantum object level is a long-lived challenge and dream of physicists. From the 1970s, the development of single ion spectroscopy and the observation of single photon states pave a way to a new era of detecting, and coherently manipulating quantum objects with electromagnetic field at single-ion levels. Later on, the invention of single molecular spectroscopy offers a new approach to investigate single quantum objects in condensed matter, where the sophisticated trapping systems like in ions and cold atoms are not needed, resulting in the discovery of various of single photon emitters embedded in solids. Among all, single quantum dots and single negatively charged nitrogen-vacancy centers in diamond attract most attentions, since their single spins can be coherently manipulated and entangled by the light field giving rise to numerous applications from nanoscale sensing to quantum computing. 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Narrow (~80 MHz) and spectrally stable optical transitions between the lowest Kramers doublets of the ground and the excited states are observed. In comparison with the large inhomogeneous broadening (500 GHz), narrow resonant transitions provide the good selectivity in the spectral domain. Moreover, the single Ce ground spin state presents a spin 1/2 system with anisotropy g factor. It results in the optical selection rules dependent on the directions of the external magnetic field. Under parallel external magnetic field with respect to the quantization axis, only the spin-flip transitions are allowed with high transition contrast. It gives the opportunity to optically initialize the ground spin state of single Ce ions with 97.5% fidelity. The coherent spin properties of single Ce ions can be investigated, after the successful optical initialization. By scanning the microwave frequency, we obtain the electron spin resonance of single Ce spin transitions. We show the spin state has a coherence time of 290 ns, which is dominated by the surrounding aluminum nuclear spin bath and impurities induced electron spin bath. The coherence time can be extended to 2 ms through dynamical decoupling method, which approaches closely to the upper limit 4.5 ms due to spin-lattice relaxation. This result indicates single Ce electron spin can be a good solid-state qubit. With the combination of optical and spin manipulations of single Ce ions, a quantum interface between a single spin and a single photon is observed by monitoring the temporal behavior of circularly polarized emission photons from the ion. We obtain the Larmor precession of the excited spin state, indicating the direct mapping of the excited spin states of single Ce ions onto the polarization states of the fluorescence photons. Furthermore, with both optical and spin access, we all-optically demonstrate coherent population trapping of a single Ce spin qubit. 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•Jan 1, 2016•1 citation
The absorption of a single photon by the simultaneous excitation of two rare-earth ions was first reported by Varsanyi and Dieke in 1961.1 D. L. Dexter explained this unusual observation by including the electron-electron interactions (that also give rise to energy transfer) between the rare earth ions with perturbation theory.2 In the 70's Dexter became interested in electronic-vibrational coupling. A theory of two-center optical transitions was developed for a rare-earth ion weakly coupled to a high energy, internal vibrational mode of a near-lying ion.3 Using theoretical techniques that had been developed for rare-earth ion pairs, intensities and selection rules could be determined.
The absorption of single photons by coupled pairs of ions in rare-earth solids was first observed by Varsanyi and Dieke.1 They noticed that weak absorption of light occurred in PrCl3 at frequencies close to the sum of transition frequencies of individual Pr ions, giving rise to rare-earth fluorescence. This effect was explained by the perturbation theory of Dexter.2 He showed that weak multipole or exchange interactions between rare-earth ions permitted the simultaneous promotion of two ions to excited states by the action of one absorbed photon in an electric dipole allowed transition. Similarly, two ions initially in excited states could emit one sum frequency photon in a cooperative manner.
tion of a single photon by a pair of rare-earth ions in a crystal, acting in cooperation. Neither ion by itself could possibly absorb the photon, since no single-ion state exists at the photon energies involved. Absorption of light occurs discretely at sums of energy-level separations in the two ions and is detected experimentally by the excitation spectrum of one of the emission lines. This is an extremely important new effect which will doubtless have important practical applications in the future as well as obvious scientific implications. It should be emphasized that this is not, in any significant degree, excitation of a molecular state. The basic reason this phenomenon is so unusual is related to the fact that the interaction of radiation with matter consists of a sum of one-electron operators, A Vi, where A is the vector potential. From this point of view, only one electron at a time could possibly be excited, hence only one ion. In this paper a procedure for computing the probability of this effect is outlined, and some of the implications of the associated phenomena are discussed. These views can be found expressed in greater detail in ref. 2.
Calculations made of the rates for several processes involving interactions between rare earth ions in crystals, such as resonance energy transfer, cooperative excitation transfer and cooperative optical transitions. These processes are assumed to originate from the electric multipole interactions between the ions concerned. A tensor operator method is employed in order to take account of the individual characters of the energy levels involved in the transition. Evaluation of the typical transition probability is also made on the lowest-order parity-allowed processes in nearest neighbour ions. The rates for the resonance transfer and cooperative transfer processes thus estimated are much smaller than those obtained by Miyakawa and Dexter.
Light-matter interaction at single quantum object level is a long-lived challenge and dream of physicists. From the 1970s, the development of single ion spectroscopy and the observation of single photon states pave a way to a new era of detecting, and coherently manipulating quantum objects with electromagnetic field at single-ion levels. Later on, the invention of single molecular spectroscopy offers a new approach to investigate single quantum objects in condensed matter, where the sophisticated trapping systems like in ions and cold atoms are not needed, resulting in the discovery of various of single photon emitters embedded in solids. Among all, single quantum dots and single negatively charged nitrogen-vacancy centers in diamond attract most attentions, since their single spins can be coherently manipulated and entangled by the light field giving rise to numerous applications from nanoscale sensing to quantum computing. They are intensively studied as the most promising candidates for the realization of solid-state quantum bits. However, these systems coupled to a complex environment which can result in rapid loss of spin coherence or optical instability. Finding an alternative solid-state single system with remarkable optical and spin properties is the motivation of this dissertation. Rare earth ions doped in inorganic crystal hosts provide promises not only by the high quality factor 4f-4f optical transitions but also by the well preserved and long-lived spin states, with the applications from solid-state laser spectroscopy to quantum information processing. However, for almost three decades, not being able to identify single rare earth elements in solids is the obstacle to achieve their full potential functionality. We demonstrated the first direct optical detection of single rare earth ions (praseodymium) in solids in 2012. This research was covered in my Master Degree Thesis. This dissertation presents experimental progress in optically detecting other single rare earth species in crystals, understanding their fundamental spectroscopy properties and coherently controlling them, which is mainly focused on single trivalent cerium ions in different host materials. Following the optical detection of single cerium ions in yttrium aluminum garnet (YAG), the optical and spin properties of single Ce ions are investigated. Single Ce ions show good photostability under the pulsed laser excitation. Still, like in other solid emitters, photo-induced dynamics of single Ce ions is observed, however, in a counterintuitive way under the continuous laser irradiation. To understand this behavior, we proposed a charge dynamics model, and developed a novel method to suppress this undesired charge dynamics. With this approach, we obtain the photoluminescence excitation spectrum of single Ce ions in YAG under a CW laser excitation. Narrow (~80 MHz) and spectrally stable optical transitions between the lowest Kramers doublets of the ground and the excited states are observed. In comparison with the large inhomogeneous broadening (500 GHz), narrow resonant transitions provide the good selectivity in the spectral domain. Moreover, the single Ce ground spin state presents a spin 1/2 system with anisotropy g factor. It results in the optical selection rules dependent on the directions of the external magnetic field. Under parallel external magnetic field with respect to the quantization axis, only the spin-flip transitions are allowed with high transition contrast. It gives the opportunity to optically initialize the ground spin state of single Ce ions with 97.5% fidelity. The coherent spin properties of single Ce ions can be investigated, after the successful optical initialization. By scanning the microwave frequency, we obtain the electron spin resonance of single Ce spin transitions. We show the spin state has a coherence time of 290 ns, which is dominated by the surrounding aluminum nuclear spin bath and impurities induced electron spin bath. The coherence time can be extended to 2 ms through dynamical decoupling method, which approaches closely to the upper limit 4.5 ms due to spin-lattice relaxation. This result indicates single Ce electron spin can be a good solid-state qubit. With the combination of optical and spin manipulations of single Ce ions, a quantum interface between a single spin and a single photon is observed by monitoring the temporal behavior of circularly polarized emission photons from the ion. We obtain the Larmor precession of the excited spin state, indicating the direct mapping of the excited spin states of single Ce ions onto the polarization states of the fluorescence photons. Furthermore, with both optical and spin access, we all-optically demonstrate coherent population trapping of a single Ce spin qubit. To scale up the system for further applications, we present the nano-scale engineering of rare earth species in YAG crystal, with the acquirement of the production yield of Ce and Pr implantation (53 and 91% respectively). The optical and spin properties of single implanted Ce ions show fairly good performance, which paves the way towards coherent coupling of single rare earth qubits in a small volume. Besides the study of single Ce ions, the spectroscopy properties of single praseodymium ions in YAG crystal are investigated. We obtain the photoluminescence excitation spectrum and the hyperfine splitting of a single praseodymium ion. All-optical control of a single praseodymium ion is achieved. In this dissertation, we solve the key problem of optically detecting, spectrally studying and coherently manipulating single rare earth ions in solids. The developed methods including optical detection, initialization, readout, coherent control and nanoscale production of single rare earth elements in crystals offer novel and powerful tools for understanding and exploring the fundamental spectroscopy properties of single rare earth elements in solids. It paves a way towards constructing scalable quantum network based on single rare earth solid-state qubits.