Ultrafast control of donor-bound electron spins with single detuned optical pulses

Abstract

A technique that controls electron spins using single optical pulses far detuned from the optical transition has been demonstrated. This approach may enable fast spin manipulation in a variety of solid-state systems. The ability to control spins in semiconductors is important in a variety of fields, including spintronics and quantum information processing. Due to the potentially fast dephasing times of spins in the solid state1,2,3, spin control operating on the picosecond timescale, or faster, may be necessary. Such speeds—which are not possible to reach with standard electron spin resonance techniques based on microwave sources—can be attained with broadband optical pulses. One promising ultrafast technique uses single broadband pulses detuned from resonance in a three-level Λ system4. This technique is robust against optical-pulse imperfections and does not require a fixed optical reference phase. Here we demonstrate, theoretically and experimentally, the principle of coherent manipulation of spins using this approach. Spin rotations with areas exceeding π/4 for a single pulse and π/2 for two pulses are achieved for donor-bound electrons. This technique might find applications from basic solid-state electron spin resonance spectroscopy to arbitrary single-qubit rotations4,5 and bang–bang control6 for quantum computation.

Cite this article

Fu, KM., Clark, S., Santori, C. et al. Ultrafast control of donor-bound electron spins with single detuned optical pulses. Nature Phys 4, 780–784 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1038/nphys1052

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