Minimising the Decoherence of Rare Earth Ion Solid State Spin Qubits
Abstract
This work has demonstrated that hyperfine decoherence times sufficiently long for QIP and quantum optics applications are achievable in rare earth ion centres. Prior to this work there were several QIP proposals using rare earth hyperfine states for long term coherent storage of optical interactions. The very long T_1 (~weeks ) observed for rare-earth hyperfine transitions appears promising but hyperfine T_2s were only a few ms, comparable to rare earth optical transitions and therefore the usefulness of such proposals was doubtful. ¶ This work demonstrated an increase in hyperfine T_2 by a factor of 7 × 10^4 compared to the previously reported hyperfine T_2 for Pr^[3+]:Y_2SiO_5 through the application of static and dynamic magnetic field techniques. This increase in T_2 makes previous QIP proposals useful and provides the first solid state optically active Lamda system with very long hyperfine T_2 for quantum optics applications. ¶ ...