Electric control of collective atomic coherence in an Erbium doped solid

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates precise, fast control of collective atomic coherence in an Erbium-doped solid using electric fields, enabling potential advancements in quantum information storage and manipulation.

Contribution

It introduces a method to control atomic coherence via electric fields in Erbium-doped solids, without prior atomic state preparation, and shows high-precision manipulation with minimal decoherence.

Findings

Electric fields can control atomic coherence with high precision.

Electric field manipulation does not cause significant decoherence.

The method enables fast dephasing and rephasing of atomic states.

Abstract

We demonstrate fast and accurate control of the evolution of collective atomic coherences in an Erbium doped solid using external electric fields. This is achieved by controlling the inhomogeneous broadening of Erbium ions emitting at 1536 nm using an electric field gradient and the linear Stark effect. The manipulation of atomic coherence is characterized with the collective spontaneous emission (optical free induction decay) emitted by the sample after an optical excitation, which does not require any previous preparation of the atoms. We show that controlled dephasing and rephasing of the atoms by the electric field result in collapses and revivals of the optical free induction decay. Our results show that the use of external electric fields does not introduce any substantial additional decoherence and enables the manipulation of collective atomic coherence with a very high degree of precision on the time scale of tens of ns. This provides an interesting resource for photonic quantum state storage and quantum state manipulation.