The photoinduced transition in magnetoresistive manganites: a comprehensive view

Abstract

We use femtosecond x-ray diffraction to study the structural response of charge and orbitally ordered Pr${}_{1-x}$Ca${}_x$MnO${}_3$ thin films across a phase transition induced by 800 nm laser pulses. By investigating the dynamics of both superlattice reflections and regular Bragg peaks, we disentangle the different structural contributions and analyze their relevant time-scales. The dynamics of the structural and charge order response are qualitatively different when excited above and below a critical fluence $f_c$. For excitations below $f_c$ the charge order and the superlattice is only partially suppressed and the ground state recovers within a few tens of nanosecond via diffusive cooling. When exciting above the critical fluence the superlattice vanishes within approximately half a picosecond followed by a change of the unit cell parameters on a 10 picoseconds time-scale. At this point all memory from the symmetry breaking is lost and the recovery time increases by many order of magnitudes due to the first order character of the structural phase transition.

References in corpus (8)

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Cited by in corpus (8)

• Dynamics of a Persistent Insulator-to-Metal Transition in Strained Manganite Films
• Evolution of the magnetic and polaronic order of $\mathrm{P}{\mathrm{r}}_{1/2}\mathrm{C}{\mathrm{a}}_{1/2}\mathrm{Mn}{\mathrm{O}}_3$ following an ultrashort light pulse
• Disentangling charge and structural contributions during coherent atomic motions studied by ultrafast resonant x-ray diffraction
• Ultrafast spin-nematic and ferroelectric phase transitions induced by femto-second light pulses
• Preserving orbital order in a layered manganite by ultrafast hybridized band excitation
• Melting of magnetic order in ${\mathrm{NaOsO}}_3$ by fs laser pulses
• Dynamics of electronic phase separation at the laser-induced insulator-metal transition in (La${}_{0.6}$Pr${}_{0.4}$)${}_{0.7}$Ca${}_{0.3}$MnO${}_3$
• Excitations across the equilibrium and photoinduced `hidden' states of magnetoresistive manganites