Tunneling Breakdown of a Strongly Correlated Insulating State in VO${}_2$ Induced by Intense Multi-Terahertz Excitation

Abstract

We directly trace the near- and mid-infrared transmission change of a VO${}_2$ thin film during an ultrafast insulator-to-metal transition triggered by high-field multi-terahertz transients. Non-thermal switching into a metastable metallic state is governed solely by the amplitude of the applied terahertz field. In contrast to resonant excitation below the threshold fluence, no signatures of excitonic self-trapping are observed. Our findings are consistent with the generation of spatially separated charge pairs and a cooperative transition into a delocalized metallic state by THz field-induced tunneling. The tunneling process is a condensed-matter analogue of the Schwinger effect in nonlinear quantum electrodynamics. We find good agreement with the pair production formula by replacing the Compton wavelength with an electronic correlation length of 2.1 $\mathring{A}$.

References in corpus (19)

• Higgs Amplitude Mode in BCS Superconductors Nb${}_{1-x}$Ti${}_x$N induced by Terahertz Pulse Excitation
• Instantaneous band gap collapse in photoexcited monoclinic VO${}_2$ due to photocarrier doping
• Ultrafast changes in lattice symmetry probed by coherent phonons
• Pair Creation of Open Strings in an Electric Field
• Ultrafast Insulator-Metal Phase Transition in VO2 Studied by Multiterahertz Spectroscopy
• Correlated metallic state of vanadium dioxide
• Breakdown of a Mott insulator -- non-adiabatic tunneling mechanism
• Ground-State Decay Rate for the Zener Breakdown in Band and Mott Insulators
• The Schwinger mechanism and graphene
• Dielectric breakdown of Mott insulators in dynamical mean-field theory
• Non-linear doublon production in a Mott insulator --- Landau-Dykhne method applied to an integrable model
• Holographic Schwinger Effect
• Scaling theory of the Mott-Hubbard metal-insulator transition in one dimension
• Non-equilibrium electronic transport in a one-dimensional Mott insulator
• Laser-Induced Above-Bandgap Transparency in GaAs
• Mixed regime of light-matter interaction revealed by phase sensitive measurements of the dynamical Franz-Keldysh effect
• Electric Field Quench in AdS/CFT
• Dielectric breakdown of Mott insulators -- doublon production and doublon heating
• Quantum electrodynamics with anisotropic scaling: Heisenberg-Euler action and Schwinger pair production in the bilayer graphene

Cited by in corpus (28)

• Floquet Engineering of Quantum Materials
• Advances in QED with intense background fields
• High harmonic imaging of ultrafast many-body dynamics in strongly correlated systems
• How optical excitation controls the structure and properties of vanadium dioxide
• Non-Thermal Resistive Switching in Mott Insulators
• Field-driven Mott gap collapse and resistive switch in correlated insulators
• Ultrafast THz Field Control of Electronic and Structural Interactions in Vanadium Dioxide
• Triply degenerate nodal points in RERh${}_6$Ge${}_4$ (RE=Y, La, Lu)
• The insulating phases of vanadium dioxide are Mott-Hubbard insulators
• Post-2000 Nonlinear Optical Materials and Measurements: Data Tables and Best Practices
• Charge and spin dynamics driven by ultrashort extreme broadband pulses: a theory perspective
• Nonequilibrium steady states of electric-field driven Mott insulators
• Multi-band non-equilibrium GW+EDMFT formalism for correlated insulators
• Nonequilibrium Mean-Field Theory of Resistive Phase Transitions
• Photo-induced nonequilibrium states in Mott insulators
• Keldysh space control of charge dynamics in a strongly driven Mott insulator
• Charge density wave melting in one-dimensional wires with femtosecond sub-gap excitation
• Long-term stabilization of carrier envelope phases of mid-infrared pulses for the precise detection of phase-sensitive responses to electromagnetic waves
• Ultrafast Laser Driven Many-Body Dynamics and Kondo Coherence Collapse
• Quantum Sensing of Insulator-to-Metal Transitions in a Mott Insulator
• Revealing Hund's multiplets in Mott insulators under strong electric fields
• Interplay of charge and spin dynamics after an interaction quench in the Hubbard model
• Light-wave coherent control of the insulator-to-metal transition in a strongly correlated material
• Melting of magnetic order in ${\mathrm{NaOsO}}_3$ by fs laser pulses
• Charge creation via quantum tunneling in one-dimensional Mott insulators: A numerical study of the extended Hubbard model
• Many-body Keldysh Crossover in the DC-driven Haldane Spin Chain
• High Harmonic Generation in Two-Dimensional Mott Insulators
• Geometric Effects on Tunneling in Driven Quantum Systems