SUPER and subpicosecond coherent control of an optical qubit in a tin-vacancy color center in diamond

The coherent excitation of an optically active spin system is one of the key elements in the engineering of a spin-photon interface. In this work, we use the novel SUPER scheme, employing nonresonant ultrashort optical pulses, to coherently control the main optical transition of a tin-vacancy color center in diamond, a promising emitter that can both be utilized as a quantum memory and a single-photon source. Furthermore, we implement a subpicosecond control scheme using resonant pulses for achieving record short quantum gates applied to diamond color centers. The employed ultrafast quantum gates open up a new regime of quantum information processing with solid-state color centers, eventually enabling multi-gate operations with the optical qubit and efficient spectral filtering of the excitation laser from deterministically prepared coherent photons.