Photon echo, spectral hole burning, and optically detected magnetic resonance inYb3+171:LiNbO3bulk crystal and waveguides

Recent progress in the realization of high-quality optical resonators and waveguides along with the possibility to incorporate rare-earth ions, make lithium niobate a promising material to build integrated platforms for quantum information processing. Yb3+171 is a particularly attractive system because it can show long coherence lifetimes at zero magnetic field thanks to transitions insensitive to magnetic field fluctuations. In this paper, we investigate the optical and spin properties of Yb3+171 ions in LiNbO3 bulk crystals as well as implanted waveguides. Using hole-burning spectroscopy and optically detected magnetic resonance, we studied ground and excited state hyperfine structures and probed optical and spin spectral holes. Importantly, the hole linewidths suggest that part of the ions in the waveguides are in a similar environment as in the bulk sample. We furthermore characterized spin population relaxation and coherence lifetimes of Yb3+171 ions in the bulk crystal at temperatures between 50 mK and 9 K. At low temperatures, T2 up to 9.5 μs (34 kHz homogeneous linewidth) and spin relaxation rates as long as ≈100 ms were measured. Our results show that Yb3+171:LiNbO3 is a system that exhibits narrow optical homogeneous linewidths over a 50 GHz bandwidth together with an electron spin degree of freedom. This is of interest for a variety of applications in integrated quantum photonics such as quantum memories or quantum processors.