Anti-Stokes excitation of solid-state quantum emitters for nanoscale thermometry
Abstract
Color centers in solids are the fundamental constituents of a plethora of applications such as lasers, light emitting diodes and sensors, as well as the foundation of advanced quantum information and communication technologies. Their photoluminescence properties are usually studied under Stokes excitation, in which the emitted photons are at a lower energy than the excitation ones. In this work, we explore the opposite Anti-Stokes process, where excitation is performed with lower energy photons. We report that the process is sufficiently efficient to excite even a single quantum system, namely the germanium-vacancy center in diamond. Consequently, we leverage the temperature-dependent, phonon-assisted mechanism to realize an all-optical nanoscale thermometry scheme that outperforms any homologous optical method employed to date. Our results frame a promising approach for exploring fundamental light-matter interactions in isolated quantum systems, and harness it towards the realization of practical nanoscale thermometry and sensing.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1810.05265,
title = {Anti-Stokes excitation of solid-state quantum emitters for nanoscale thermometry},
author = {Toan Trong Tran and Blake Regan and Evgeny A. Ekimov and Zhao Mu and Zhou Yu and Weibo Gao and Prineha Narang and Alexander S. Solntsev and Milos Toth and Igor Aharonovich and Carlo Bradac},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1810.05265},
year = {2018}
}