Recent Advances in Rare Earth Doped Inorganic Crystalline Materials for Quantum Information Processing

Since quantum information technologies are expected to offer communication security and high computational capacities, research in the field is currently attracting a lot of attention. Among the materials studied so far, rare earth doped inorganic insulators are one of the most promising. With the different available trivalent rare earth ions, the visible and the IR range including the telecom wavelength at 1.5 μm can be covered. Transitions are usually narrow, and at low temperatures, long optical and spin coherence time can often be observed. Investigations using bulk single crystals have already led to many promising results.  Recently, spectroscopic studies have been extended to other forms of inorganic materials, such as transparent ceramics, thin films and nanoparticles for single rare-earth qubits. Progress in these areas is expected to offer many new possibilities for the design of quantum light-matter interfaces and scalable quantum memories and processors.