Super-resolution microscopy of single rare-earth emitters

Abstract

We demonstrate super-resolution imaging of single rare-earth emitting centers, namely, trivalent cerium, in yttrium aluminum garnet (YAG) crystals by means of stimulated emission depletion (STED) microscopy. The achieved all-optical resolution is $\approx$ 80nm. Similar results were obtained on H3 color centers in diamond with resolution of $\approx$ 60nm. In both cases, STED resolution is improving slower than the inverse square-root of the depletion beam intensity. This is caused by excited state absorption (ESA) and interaction of the emitter with non-fluorescing crystal defects in its near surrounding.

References in corpus (7)

• Photon antibunching in the fluorescence of individual color centers in diamond
• Room temperature entanglement between distant single spins in diamond
• Scalable quantum register based on coupled electron spins in a room temperature solid
• Coherent properties of single rare-earth spin qubits
• Mapping spin coherence of a single rare-earth ion in a crystal onto a single photon polarization state
• Superresolution optical magnetic imaging and spectroscopy using individual electronic spins in diamond
• Production yield of rare-earth ions implanted into an optical crystal

Cited by in corpus (7)

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• High connectivity quantum processor nodes using single-ion-qubits in rare-earth-ion-doped crystals
• Super-resolved imaging of a single cold atom on a nanosecond timescale
• Quantum-limited superresolution of two arbitrary incoherent point sources: beating the resurgence of Rayleigh's curse
• Deterministic relation between optical polarization and lattice symmetry revealed in ion-doped single microcrystals
• Designing gate operations for single ion quantum computing in rare-earth-ion-doped crystals