Epitaxial CeO2 Films as a Host for Quantum Applications

Quantum Physics [Submitted on 26 Mar 2026] Epitaxial CeO2 Films as a Host for Quantum Applications Pralay Paul, Kusal M. Abeywickrama, Nisha Geng, Mritunjaya Parashar, Levi Brown, Mohin Sharma, Darshpreet Kaur Saini, Melissa Ayala Artola, Todd A. Byers, Bibhudutta Rout, Yiwei Ju, Xiaoqing Pan, Sumit Goswami, Sreehari Puthan Purayil, Casey Kerr, Dhiman Biswas, Ben Summers, Bin Wang, Horst Hahn, Alisa Javadi, T. Venkatesan In highly purified host, the coherence of quantum emitters is ultimately limited by hyperfine interactions between the emitter and lattice nuclei possessing non-zero nuclear magnetic moments. This limitation can only be mitigated through isotopic purification. In this work, we investigate CeO2 as a host composed entirely of nuclei with zero nuclear moment. High-quality CeO2 thin films were grown by PLD and doped with Tm and Er ions. Structural characterization using X-ray diffraction, atomic force microscopy, and ion channeling confirms single-crystalline, atomically smooth films with dopants substitutionally incorporated at Ce lattice sites. Photoluminescence lifetime measurements show significantly longer lifetimes for Er-doped CeO2 (2.9 - 5.3 ms) compared with Tm-doped films (14 - 68 {\mu}s). Moreover, the Er-doped PLD films exhibit longer lifetimes at ~1% dopant concentration than previously reported for MBE-grown films. Density functional theory calculations reveal a substantial overlap between unoccupied O 2p and Tm 4f states near the valence band maximum, whereas Er 4f states remain well isolated. This electronic interaction likely introduces non-radiative recombination pathways in Tm-doped CeO2, explaining the reduced lifetimes. These findings highlight the importance of selecting appropriate dopant-host combinations and optimized growth conditions to minimize non-radiative channels for quantum applications. Subjects: Quantum Physics (quant-ph); Materials Science (cond-mat.mtrl-sci) Cite as: arXiv:2603.25234 [quant-ph]   (or arXiv:2603.25234v1 [quant-ph] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2603.25234 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Alisa Javadi [view email] [v1] Thu, 26 Mar 2026 09:35:56 UTC (1,470 KB) Access Paper: view license Current browse context: quant-ph < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-03 Change to browse by: cond-mat cond-mat.mtrl-sci References & Citations INSPIRE HEP NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)