Excited-state lifetime measurement of silicon vacancy centers in diamond by single-photon frequency upconversion

• Published in: Laser physics Vol. 28; no. 5; pp. 55401 - 55405
• Main Authors: Rong, Youying, Ma, Jianhui, Chen, Lingxiao, Liu, Yan, Siyushev, Petr, Wu, Botao, Pan, Haifeng, Jelezko, Fedor, Wu, E, Zeng, Heping
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: IOP Publishing 01.05.2018
• Subjects: excited-state lifetime; silicon vacancy center in diamond; single-photon frequency upconversion
• ISSN: 1054-660X; 1555-6611
• DOI: 10.1088/1555-6611/aaa02f

We report a method with high time resolution to measure the excited-state lifetime of silicon vacancy centers in bulk diamond avoiding timing jitter from the single-photon detectors. Frequency upconversion of the fluorescence emitted from silicon vacancy centers was achieved from 738 nm to 436 nm via sum frequency generation with a short pump pulse. The excited-state lifetime can be obtained by measuring the intensity of upconverted light while the pump delay changes. As a probe, a pump laser with pulse duration of 11 ps provided a high temporal resolution of the measurement. The lifetime extracted from the pump-probe curve was 0.755 ns, which was comparable to the timing jitter of the single-photon detectors.