Optical coherence properties of Kramers' rare-earth ions at the nanoscale for quantum applications

Rare Earth (RE) ion doped nanomaterials are promising candidates for a range of quantum technology applications. Among RE ions, the so-called Kramers' ions possess spin transitions in the GHz range at low magnetic fields, which allows for high-bandwidth multimode quantum storage, fast qubit operations as well as interfacing with superconducting circuits. They also present relevant optical transitions in the infrared. In particular, Er3+ has an optical transition in the telecom band, while Nd3+ presents a high-emission-rate transition close to 890 nm. In this paper, we measure spectroscopic properties that are of relevance to using these materials in quantum technology applications. We find the inhomogeneous linewidth to be 10.7 GHz for Er3+ and 8.2 GHz for Nd3+, and the excited state lifetime T-1 to be 13.68 ms for Er3+ and 540 mu s for Nd3+. We study the dependence of homogeneous linewidth on temperature for both samples, with the narrowest linewidth being 379 kHz (T-2 = 839 ns) for Er3+ measured at 3 K, and 62 kHz (T-2 = 5.14 mu s) for Nd3+ measured at 1.6 K. Further, we investigate time-dependent homogeneous linewidth broadening due to spectral diffusion and the dependence of the homogeneous linewidth on magnetic field to get additional clarity of mechanisms that can influence the coherence time. In light of our results, we discuss two applications: single qubit-state readout and a Fourier-limited single photon source.