Optical decoherence and spectral diffusion in an erbium-doped silica glass fiber featuring long-lived spin sublevels

Abstract

Understanding decoherence in cryogenically-cooled rare-earth-ion doped glass fibers is of fundamental interest and a prerequisite for applications of these material in quantum information applications. Here we study the coherence properties in a weakly doped erbium silica glass fiber motivated by our recent observation of efficient and long-lived Zeeman sublevel storage in this material and by its potential for applications at telecommunication wavelengths. We analyze photon echo decays as well as the potential mechanisms of spectral diffusion that can be caused by coupling with dynamic disorder modes that are characteristic for glassy hosts, and by the magnetic dipole-dipole interactions between $E{r}^{3+}$ ions. We also investigate the effective linewidth as a function of magnetic field, temperature and time, and then present a model that describes these experimental observations. We highlight that the operating conditions (0.6 K and 0.05 T) at which we previously observed efficient spectral hole burning coincide with those for narrow linewidths (1 MHz) { an important property for applications that has not been reported before for a rare-earth-ion doped glass.

6 pages and 5 figures

References in corpus (2)

• Quantum storage of entangled telecom-wavelength photons in an erbium-doped optical fibre
• Investigations of Optical Coherence Properties in an Erbium-doped Silicate Fiber for Quantum State Storage

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• Quadratic Zeeman Spectral Diffusion of Thulium Ion Population in a Yttrium Gallium Garnet Crystal
• Hole burning experiments and modeling in erbium-doped silica glass fibers down to millikelvin temperatures: evidence for ultra-long population storage
• Erbium Quantum Memory Platform with Long Optical Coherence via Back-End of Line Deposition on Foundry-Fabricated Photonics