Weak probe readout of coherent impurity orbital superpositions in silicon

Pump-probe spectroscopy is the most common time-resolved technique for investigation of electronic dynamics, and the results provide the incoherent population decay time T1. Here we use a modified pump-probe experiment to investigate coherent dynamics, and we demonstrate this with a measurement of the inhomogeneous dephasing time T2∗ for phosphorus impurities in silicon. The pulse sequence produces the same information as previous coherent all-optical (photon-echo-based) techniques but is simpler. The probe signal strength is first order in the pulse area but its effect on the target state is only second order, meaning that it does not demolish the quantum information. We propose simple extensions to the technique to measure the homogeneous dephasing time T2, or to perform tomography of the target qubit.