Deterministic relation between optical polarization and lattice symmetry revealed in ion-doped single microcrystals

Abstract

Rare-earth ions doped crystals are of great significance for micro-sensing and quantum information, whilst the ions in the crystals emit light with spontaneous partial polarization, which is, though believed to be originated from the crystal lattice structure, still lacking a deterministic explanation that can be tested with quantitative accuracy. We report the experimental evidence showing the profound physical relation between the polarization degree of light emitted by the doped ion and the lattice symmetry, by demonstrating, with unprecedented precision, that the lattice constant ratio c/a directly quantifies the macroscopic effective polar angle of the electric and magnetic dipoles, which essentially determines the linear polarization degree of the emission. Based on this discovery, we further propose a pure optical technology to identify the three-dimensional orientation of a rod-shaped single microcrystal using the polarization-resolved micro-spectroscopy. Our results, revealing the physical origin of light polarization in ion-doped crystals, open the way towards on-demand polarization control with crystallography, and provide a versatile platform for polarization-based microscale sensing in dynamical systems.

arXiv comment40 pages, 15 figures, 4 tables

References in corpus (15)

• Giant nonlinear optical responses from photon avalanching nanoparticles
• Coherent control and single-shot readout of a rare-earth ion embedded in a nanophotonic cavity
• One-hour coherent optical storage in an atomic frequency comb memory
• Optically addressing single rare-earth ions in a nanophotonic cavity
• Rare-Earth Molecular Crystals with Ultra-narrow Optical Linewidths for Photonic Quantum Technologies
• On-chip coherent microwave-to-optical transduction mediated by ytterbium in YVO${}_4$
• Mapping and Quantifying Electric and Magnetic Dipole Luminescence at the nanoscale
• Monitoring the orientation of rare-earth-doped nanorods for flow shear tomography
• Deterministic single ion implantation of rare-earth ions for nanometer resolution colour center generation
• On-chip storage of broadband photonic qubits in a cavity-protected rare-earth ensemble
• Spontaneous and Directed Symmetry Breaking in the Formation of Chiral Nanocrystals
• Bright sub-20 nm cathodoluminescent nanoprobes for multicolor electron microscopy
• Optical coherence of Er${}^{3+}$:Y${}_2$O${}_3$ ceramics for telecommunication quantum technologies
• Super-resolution microscopy of single rare-earth emitters
• Measuring the magnetic dipole transition of single nanorods by spectroscopy and Fourier microscopy