  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.
