Indistinguishable telecom band photons from a single Er ion in the solid state

Salim Ourari; Łukasz Dusanowski; Sebastian P Horvath; Mehmet T Uysal; Christopher M Phenicie; Paul Stevenson; Mouktik Raha; Songtao Chen; Robert J Cava; Nathalie P de Leon; Jeff D Thompson

doi:10.1038/s41586-023-06281-4

Indistinguishable telecom band photons from a single Er ion in the solid state

Nature. 2023 Aug;620(7976):977-981. doi: 10.1038/s41586-023-06281-4. Epub 2023 Aug 30.

Authors

Affiliations

¹ Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA.
² Department of Physics, Northeastern University, Boston, MA, USA.
³ Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Rice University, Houston, TX, USA.
⁴ Department of Chemistry, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA.
⁵ Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA. jdthompson@princeton.edu.

^# Contributed equally.

PMID: 37648759
DOI: 10.1038/s41586-023-06281-4

Abstract

Atomic defects in the solid state are a key component of quantum repeater networks for long-distance quantum communication¹. Recently, there has been significant interest in rare earth ions^2-4, in particular Er³⁺ for its telecom band optical transition^5-7 that allows long-distance transmission in optical fibres. However, the development of repeater nodes based on rare earth ions has been hampered by optical spectral diffusion, precluding indistinguishable single-photon generation. Here, we implant Er³⁺ into CaWO₄, a material that combines a non-polar site symmetry, low decoherence from nuclear spins⁸ and is free of background rare earth ions, to realize significantly reduced optical spectral diffusion. For shallow implanted ions coupled to nanophotonic cavities with large Purcell factor, we observe single-scan optical linewidths of 150 kHz and long-term spectral diffusion of 63 kHz, both close to the Purcell-enhanced radiative linewidth of 21 kHz. This enables the observation of Hong-Ou-Mandel interference⁹ between successively emitted photons with a visibility of V = 80(4)%, measured after a 36 km delay line. We also observe spin relaxation times T_1,s = 3.7 s and T_2,s > 200 μs, with the latter limited by paramagnetic impurities in the crystal instead of nuclear spins. This represents a notable step towards the construction of telecom band quantum repeater networks with single Er³⁺ ions.