Nanowerk March 11, 2022
Rare-earth ions (REIs) are promising solid-state systems for building light–matter interfaces at the quantum level. However, few crystalline materials have shown an environment quiet enough to fully exploit REI properties. Molecular systems can provide such capability but generally lack spin states and they show broad optical lines that severely limit optical-to-spin coherent interfacing. An international team of researchers (France, Germany) found that europium molecular crystals exhibit linewidths in the tens of kilohertz range, orders of magnitude narrower than those of other molecular systems. They harnessed this property to demonstrate efficient optical spin initialization, coherent storage of light using an atomic frequency comb, and optical control of ion–ion interactions towards implementation of quantum gates. The work has illustrated the utility of rare-earth molecular crystals as a new platform for photonic quantum technologies that combines highly coherent emitters with the unmatched versatility in composition, structure, and integration capability of molecular materials…read more. TECHNICAL ARTICLE
Ultra-narrow optical homogeneous linewidths. Credit: Nature volume 603, pages241–246 (2022)Â