RESUMO
Third-order non-linearities are important because they allow control over light pulses in ubiquitous high-quality centro-symmetric materials like silicon and silica. Degenerate four-wave mixing provides a direct measure of the third-order non-linear sheet susceptibility χ(3)L (where L represents the material thickness) as well as technological possibilities such as optically gated detection and emission of photons. Using picosecond pulses from a free electron laser, we show that silicon doped with P or Bi has a value of χ(3)L in the THz domain that is higher than that reported for any other material in any wavelength band. The immediate implication of our results is the efficient generation of intense coherent THz light via upconversion (also a χ(3) process), and they open the door to exploitation of non-degenerate mixing and optical nonlinearities beyond the perturbative regime.
RESUMO
Quantum memories capable of storing and retrieving coherent information for extended times at room temperature would enable a host of new technologies. Electron and nuclear spin qubits using shallow neutral donors in semiconductors have been studied extensively but are limited to low temperatures (â²10 kelvin); however, the nuclear spins of ionized donors have the potential for high-temperature operation. We used optical methods and dynamical decoupling to realize this potential for an ensemble of phosphorous-31 donors in isotopically purified silicon-28 and observed a room-temperature coherence time of over 39 minutes. We further showed that a coherent spin superposition can be cycled from 4.2 kelvin to room temperature and back, and we report a cryogenic coherence time of 3 hours in the same system.