Measurement of the hyperfine structure of Pr³: YAG by quantum-beat free-induction decay, hole burning, and optically detected nuclear quadrupole resonance

The hyperfine splitting of the ground state and the lowest electronic component of the 1D2 excited state have been measured for Pr3+ in YAG. We show that a particularly simple and powerful technique is the production of sublevel coherence by short-pulse (impact) excitation, which is detected by coherent forward scattering of a weak probe beam and Fourier transformation of the resulting quantum-beat signal. This yielded excited-state splittings of 6.49 and 8.29 MHz. The ground state shows large pseudoquadrupole splittings of 33.4 and 41.6 MHz, which were obtained by optically detected nuclear quadrupole resonance. © 1983 Optical Society of America.