Abstract

Optical hole burning (OHB) on rare earth ions has so far been performed mainly on single crystals which have been developed as a laser host material. However, an essential drawback of most of these lattices is the high nuclear spin density s of the constituting ions, giving rise to a broadening of the homogeneous width of the absorption of individual rare earth ions [1]. As a result of a limited number of elements providing a high natural abundance of isotopes with zero nuclear spin I or small nuclear momentum µ, there are not too many existing or possible new host lattices to work on. Further restrictions arise in the case of heterogeneous doping as well as from a given site symmetry.

© 1996 IEEE