Erbium-doped materials can serve as spin-photon interfaces with optical transitions in the telecom C-band, making them an exciting class of materials for long-distance quantum communication. However, the spin and optical coherence times of Er3+ ions are limited by currently available host materials, motivating the development of new Er3+-containing materials. Here, we demonstrate the use of ion implantation to efficiently screen prospective host candidates, and show that disorder introduced by ion implantation can be mitigated through post-implantation thermal processing to achieve inhomogeneous linewidths comparable to bulk linewidths in as-grown samples. We present optical spectroscopy data for each host material, which allows us to determine the level structure of each site, allowing us to compare the environments of Er3+ introduced via implantation and via doping during growth. We demonstrate that implantation can generate a range of local environments for Er3+, including those observed in bulk-doped materials, and that the populations of these sites can be controlled with thermal processing.
@article{arxiv.2110.04876,
title = {Erbium-Implanted Materials for Quantum Communication Applications},
author = {Paul Stevenson and Christopher M Phenicie and Isaiah Gray and Sebastian P Horvath and Sacha Welinski and Austin M Ferrenti and Alban Ferrier and Philippe Goldner and Sujit Das and Ramamoorthy Ramesh and Robert J Cava and Nathalie P de Leon and Jeff D Thompson},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2110.04876},
year = {2022}
}