Efficient photon excitation readout for individual erbium ions in silicon

Here we would report the charge detection mechanism of a single erbium ion in a silicon transistor by pulsed light. Erbium atoms were implanted in a silicon transistor and then the device was cooled down to 4K[1]. In the continuous wavelength scan, we saw a binary signal when the erbium ion was on resonance. Based on this feature, instead of using continuous wavelength scan, we utilised Dark-OnRes-Dark-Reset pulse sequences to excite the erbium ion.We found a 30MHz widel line width while the line width was 120MHz via continuous wavelength scan. We would also give a upper bound for the optical lifetime of 13/2 excited state, which is around 20us, limited by the bandwidth of our setup.

[1] Yin, C. et al. Optical addressing of an individual erbium ion in silicon. Nature 497, 91–94 (2013).