Rafaela Brinn1,Piush Behera1,Peter Meisenheimer1,Medha Dandu2,Archana Raja2,Ramamoorthy Ramesh3,1,2
University of California, Berkeley1,Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory2,Rice University3
Rafaela Brinn1,Piush Behera1,Peter Meisenheimer1,Medha Dandu2,Archana Raja2,Ramamoorthy Ramesh3,1,2
University of California, Berkeley1,Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory2,Rice University3
Manipulation of spins by an electric field, rather than a magnetic field, has been an active area of research due to the potential applications in low power spintronics. Existing studies have focused on the manipulation of magnetization in materials with long range magnetic order. Recently, however, the manipulation of single spins with an electric field in doped ferroelectric systems has attracted interest. Ferroelectric oxides, such as PbTiO<sub>3</sub>, offer a pathway to control the spin direction by manipulation of the ferroelectric order parameter, and thus the local crystal field of the defect site. Recent work on bulk Fe<sup>3+</sup> doped PbTi<sup>4+</sup>O<sub>3</sub> crystals have shown that the anisotropy of the Fe spins can be controlled by rotation of the electric dipole in PbTiO<sub>3</sub><sup>1</sup>, however this effect only appears at low temperatures and has only been observed using microwave spectroscopy. In this work, we prepared Pb<sub>1.199</sub>Er<sub>0.001</sub>TiO<sub>3 </sub>films with a thickness of 100 nm on top of TiO<sub>2</sub>-terminated single-crystalline SrTiO<sub>3 </sub>(001) substrates via pulsed-laser deposition. The Er ion substitutes the <i>A</i>-site (Pb-site) of the perovskite. Er<sup>3+</sup>-doped materials are heavily studied, due to long electron and nuclear spin coherence times and telecom-wavelength spin-photon interfaces, making Er-dopants a strong potential candidate for long-distance quantum communication. Using time-resolved photoluminescence, we can measure the spin-lifetime by examining the decay of our photoluminescence signal after optically exciting an electronic transition in the Er<sup>3+</sup>. Previous measurements of bulk Er<sup>3+</sup> doped crystals have shown spin lifetimes on the order of 100s of microseconds<sup>2</sup>. Though less than that of quantum emitters in state-of-the-art systems, the potential for tunability with electric field may open the path for a new way of manipulating information without using energy intensive magnetic fields or large photonic based systems.<br/><br/>References:<br/>[1] Liu, Junjie, et al. "Coherent electric field manipulation of Fe3+ spins in PbTiO3." <i>Science advances</i> 7.10 (2021)<br/>[2] Stevenson, Paul, et al. "Erbium-Implanted Materials for Quantum Communication Applications." <i>Phys. Rev. B</i> 105, 224106 (2022)