Microwave-optical double resonance in a erbium-doped whispering-gallery-mode resonator

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates a high-quality erbium-doped whispering-gallery-mode resonator enabling strong coupling with collective erbium transitions, and introduces a modified optically detected magnetic resonance technique for probing spin transitions beyond inhomogeneous linewidths.

Contribution

It presents a novel integrated microwave-optical resonator system with enhanced coupling and a new magnetic resonance measurement method leveraging strong coupling effects.

Findings

Achieved optical quality factors >10^8 with linewidths <2 MHz.

Demonstrated coupling strengths up to 2π×1.2 GHz, reaching ensemble strong coupling.

Introduced a modified magnetic resonance measurement based on coupling strength changes.

Abstract

We showcase an erbium-doped whispering-gallery-mode resonator with optical modes that display intrinsic quality factors better than $10^8$ (linewidths less than 2 MHz), and coupling strengths to collective erbium transitions of up to 2$\pi\times$1.2 GHz - enough to reach the ensemble strong coupling regime. Our optical cavity sits inside a microwave resonator, allowing us to probe the spin transition which is tuned by an external magnetic field. We show a modified optically detected magnetic resonance measurement that measures population transfer by a change in coupling strength rather than absorption coefficient. This modification was enabled by the strong coupling to our modes, and allows us to optically probe the spin transition detuned by more than the inhomogeneous linewidth. We contrast this measurement with electron paramagnetic resonance to experimentally show that our optical modes are confined in a region of large microwave magnetic field and we explore how such a geometry could be used for coherent microwave-optical transduction.