Ultrafast control of donor-bound electron spins with single detuned optical pulses

The ability to control spins in semiconductors is important in a variety of fields including spintronics and quantum information processing. Due to the potentially fast dephasing times of spins in the solid state [1-3], spin control operating on the picosecond or faster timescale may be necessary. Such speeds, which are not possible to attain with standard electron spin resonance (ESR) techniques based on microwave sources, can be attained with broadband optical pulses. One promising ultrafast technique utilizes single broadband pulses detuned from resonance in a three-level Lambda system [4]. This attractive technique is robust against optical pulse imperfections and does not require a fixed optical reference phase. Here we demonstrate the principle of coherent manipulation of spins theoretically and experimentally. Using this technique, donor-bound electron spin rotations with single-pulse areas exceeding pi/4 and two-pulses areas exceeding pi/2 are demonstrated. We believe the maximum pulse areas attained do not reflect a fundamental limit of the technique and larger pulse areas could be achieved in other material systems. This technique has applications from basic solid-state ESR spectroscopy to arbitrary single-qubit rotations [4, 5] and bang-bang control[6] for quantum computation.Comment: 15 pages, 4 figures, submitted 12/2008. Since the submission of this work we have become aware of related work: J. Berezovsky, M. H. Mikkelsen, N. G. Stoltz, L. A. Coldren, and D. D. Awschalom, Science 320: 349-352 (2008

Two-color picosecond and continuous-wave experiments on anti-Stokes and Stokes carrier-transfer phenomena in GaAslAl(x)Ga(1-x)As and InGaP2/AlxGa1-xAs heterostructures

We present direct evidence of the two-step absorption process in anti-Stokes photoluminescence in both GaAs/AlxGa1-xAs and InGaP2/AlxGa1-xAs heterostructures using two-color picosecond and continuous-wave photoluminescence experiments. We show information about the lifetime of the defect states that participate in the two-step absorption process. As a result, we conclude that the long-lived states rather than excitons play the dominant role in the two-step absorption process. We also study the possible contribution of the two-step absorption process to Stokes carrier transfer in GaAs/AlxGa1-xAs asymmetric double quantum well structuresclos