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More than 4 orders of magnitude of cavity-linewidth narrowing in a rare-earth-ion-doped crystal cavity, emanating from strong intracavity dispersion caused by off-resonant interaction with dopant ions, is demonstrated. The dispersion profiles are engineered using optical pumping techniques creating significant semipermanent but reprogrammable changes of the rare-earth absorption profiles. Several cavity modes are shown within the spectral transmission window. Several possible applications of this phenomenon are discussed.

In optically controlled quantum computers it may be favorable to address different qubits using light with different frequencies, since the optical diffraction does not then limit the distance between qubits. Using qubits that are close to each other enables qubit-qubit interactions and gate operations that are strong and fast in comparison to qubit-environment interactions and decoherence rates. However, as qubits are addressed in frequency space, great care has to be taken when designing the laser pulses, so that they perform the desired operation on one qubit, without affecting other qubits. Complex hyperbolic secant pulses have theoretically been shown to be excellent for such frequency-addressed quantum computing [I. Roos and K. Molmer, Phys. Rev. A 69, 022321 (2004)]-e.g., for use in quantum computers based on optical interactions in rare-earth-metal-ion- doped crystals. The optical transition lines of the rare-earth-metal-ions are inhomogeneously broadened and therefore the frequency of the excitation pulses can be used to selectively address qubit ions that are spatially separated by a distance much less than a wavelength. Here, frequency-selective transfer of qubit ions between qubit states using complex hyperbolic secant pulses is experimentally demonstrated. Transfer efficiencies better than 90% were obtained. Using the complex hyperbolic secant pulses it was also possible to create two groups of ions, absorbing at specific frequencies, where 85% of the ions at one of the frequencies was shifted out of resonance with the field when ions in the other frequency group were excited. This procedure of selecting interacting ions, called qubit distillation, was carried out in preparation for two-qubit gate operations in the rare-earth-metal-ion-doped crystals. The techniques for frequency-selective state-to-state transfer developed here may be also useful also for other quantum optics and quantum information experiments in these long-coherence-time solid-state s

Due to their narrow homogeneous linewidths, rare-earth ions in inorganic crystals at low temperatures have recently been given considerable attention as test materials for experiments in coherent quantum optics. Because these narrow linewidth transitions have been buried in a wide inhomogeneous line, the scope of experiments that could be carried out in these materials has been limited. However, here we present spectroscopic techniques, based on spectral hole burning and optical pumping, which allow hyperfine transitions that are initially buried within an inhomogeneously broadened absorption line to be studied with no background absorption from other transitions. A sequence of hole-burning pulses is used to isolate selected transitions between hyperfine levels, which makes it possible to directly study properties of the transitions, e.g., transition strengths, and gives access to information that is difficult to obtain in standard hole-burning spectroscopy, such as the ordering of hyperfine levels. The techniques introduced are applicable to absorbers in a solid with long-lived sublevels in the ground state and where the homogeneous linewidth and sublevel separations are smaller than the inhomogeneous broadening of the optical transition. In particular, this includes rare-earth ions doped into inorganic crystals and in the present work the techniques are demonstrated in spectroscopy of Pr3+ in Y2SiO5. Information on the hyperfine structure and relative transition strengths of the H-3(4)-D-1(2) hyperfine transitions in Pr3+:Y2SiO5 has been obtained from frequency-resolved absorption measurements, in combination with coherent and incoherent driving of the transitions.