Abstract

Rare earth atoms are important as active elements in classical optical communication. Also for quantum information they turn out to be of great use owing to their outstandingly long nuclear spin lifetimes and convenient absorption wave lengths. A missing element so far was the capability to address single rare earth atoms which might be of importance for refined quantum protocols like entanglement purification etc. The talk will describe the detection of single rare earth ions as well as spin photon correlations on these systems.

© 2012 Optical Society of America