High-resolution laser spectroscopy of rare-earth doped insulators: a personal perspective

I offer some reflections on the past three decades of high-resolution spectroscopy of rare-earth ions in solids which was ushered in by the development of tunable lasers in the mid 1970s. A brief review is given of some of the accomplishments in the area of spectral hole-burning and coherent transient spectroscopy, emphasizing work with which the author has been associated. Spectral hole-burning has been characterized by a richness of mechanisms. These include population storage in nuclear-spin and electron-spin Zeeman sub-levels, hyperfine and superhyperfine levels and metastable optical levels with corresponding hole lifetimes from many hours to microseconds. In addition, persistent hole-burning has been seen in disordered materials and in those showing photo-ionization or photo-chemistry following excitation into zero-phonon lines. This has made hole-burning a generally useful technique for the measurement of magnetic and electric dipole moments, hyperfine interactions, spin relaxation and thermally induced line-broadening. Photon-echoes have proven to be the prime source of coherence-time information and coherence times as long as several milliseconds corresponding to optical resonance widths of less than 100 Hz have been reported. Tables summarizing these results and providing references to original work are included