Optical decoherence and spectral diffusion in an erbium-doped silica glass fiber featuring long-lived spin sublevels

Understanding decoherence in cryogenically cooled rare-earth-ion doped glass fibers is of fundamental interest and a prerequisite for applications of these material in quantum information applications. Here we study the coherence properties in a weakly doped erbium silica glass fiber motivated by our recent observation of efficient and long-lived Zeeman sublevel storage in this material and by its potential for applications at telecommunication wavelengths. We analyze photon echo decays as well as the potential mechanisms of spectral diffusion that can be caused by coupling with dynamic disorder modes that are characteristic for glassy hosts, and by the magnetic dipole-dipole interactions between Er3+ ions. We also investigate the effective linewidth as a function of magnetic field, temperature, and time, and then present a model that describes these experimental observations. We highlight that the operating conditions (0.6 K and 0.05 T) at which we previously observed efficient spectral hole burning coincide with those for narrow linewidths (1 MHz)-an important property for applications that has not been reported before for a rare-earth-ion doped glass.