Ultrafast jamming of electrons into an amorphous entangled state

Abstract

New emergent states of matter in quantum systems may be created under non-equilibrium conditions if - through many body interactions - its constituents order on a timescale which is shorter than the time required for the system to reach thermal equilibrium. Conventionally non-equilibrium ordering is discussed in terms of symmetry breaking, nonthermal order-disorder, and more recently quenched topological transitions. Here we report a fundamentally new and unusual metastable form of amorphous correlation-localized fermionic matter, which is formed in a new type of quantum transition at low temperature either by short pulse photoexcitation or by electrical charge injection in the transition metal dichalcogenide 1T-TaS2. Scanning tunnelling microscopy (STM) reveals a pseudo-amorphous packing of localized electrons within the crystal lattice that is significantly denser than its hexagonally ordered low-temperature ground state, or any other ordered states of the system. Remarkably, the arrangement is not random, but displays a hyperuniform spatial density distribution commonly encountered in classical jammed systems, showing no signs of aggregation or phase separation. Unexpectedly for a localized electron system, tunnelling spectroscopy and multi- STM-tip surface resistance measurements reveal that the overall state is gapless and conducting, which implies that localized and itinerant carriers are resonantly entangled. The amorphous localized electron subsystem can be understood theoretically to arise from strong correlations between polarons sparsely dispersed on a 2D hexagonal atomic lattice, while itinerant carriers act as a resonantly coupled reservoir distinct in momentum space.

12 pages, 4 figures

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Cited by in corpus (32)

• Nonthermal pathways to ultrafast control in quantum materials
• Stone-Wales Defects Preserve Hyperuniformity in Amorphous Two-Dimensional Materials
• Hyperuniform monocrystalline structures by spinodal solid-state dewetting
• Atomic-scale Manipulation of Single-Polaron in a Two-Dimensional Semiconductor
• Unconventional hysteretic transition in a charge density wave
• A time-domain phase diagram of metastable states in a charge ordered quantum material
• Snapshots of a light-induced metastable hidden phase driven by the collapse of charge order
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• Origin of Distinct Insulating Domains in the Layered Charge Density Wave Material 1T-TaS2
• A high-efficiency programmable modulator for extreme ultraviolet light with nm feature size based on an electronic phase transition
• Stochastic semiclassical theory for non-equilibrium electron-phonon coupled systems
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• Thickness dependent charge density wave networks on thin 1T-TaS${}_2$
• First-order kinetics bottleneck during photoinduced ultrafast insulator-metal transition in 3D orbitally-driven Peierls insulator CuIr${}_2$S${}_4$
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