Sub-MHz homogeneous linewidth in epitaxial Y₂O₃: Eu³⁺ thin film on silicon

Thin films provide nanoscale confinement together with compatibility with photonic and microwave architectures, making them ideal candidates for chip-scale quantum devices. In this work, we propose a thin film fabrication approach yielding the epitaxial growth of Eu³⁺ doped Y₂O₃ on silicon. We combine two of the most prominent thin film deposition techniques: chemical vapor deposition (CVD) and molecular beam epitaxy (MBE). We report sub-megahertz optical homogeneous linewidths up to 8 K for the Eu³⁺ dopants in the film, and lowest value of 270 kHz. This result constitutes a ten-fold improvement with respect to previous reports on the same material, opening promising perspectives for the development of scalable and compact quantum devices containing rare-earth ions.