Rare-earth-doped crystals are excellent hardware for quantum storage of optical information. Additional functionality of these materials is added by their waveguiding properties allowing for on-chip photonic networks. However, detection and coherent properties of rare-earth single-spin qubits have not been demonstrated so far. Here, we present experimental results on high-fidelity optical initialization, effcient coherent manipulation, and optical readout of a single electron spin of Ce3+ ion in a YAG crystal. Under dynamic decoupling, spin coherence lifetime reaches T2=2 ms and is almost limited by the measured spin-lattice relaxation time T1=3.8 ms. Strong hyperfine coupling to aluminium nuclear spins suggests that cerium electron spins can be exploited as an interface between photons and long-lived nuclear spin memory. Combined with high brightness of Ce3+ emission and a possibility of creating photonic circuits out of the host material, this makes cerium spins an interesting option for integrated quantum photonics.
@article{arxiv.1405.5258,
title = {Coherent properties of single rare-earth spin qubits},
author = {P. Siyushev and K. Xia and R. Reuter and M. Jamali and N. Zhao and N. Yang and C. Duan and N. Kukharchyk and A. D. Wieck and R. Kolesov and J. Wrachtrup},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1405.5258},
year = {2014}
}