Orbital dynamics during an ultrafast insulator to metal transition

Abstract

Phase transitions driven by ultrashort laser pulses have attracted interest both for understanding the fundamental physics of phase transitions and for potential new data storage or device applications. In many cases these transitions involve transient states that are different from those seen in equilibrium. To understand the microscopic properties of these states, it is useful to develop elementally selective probing techniques that operate in the time domain. Here we show fs-time-resolved measurements of V Ledge Resonant Inelastic X-Ray Scattering (RIXS) from the insulating phase of the Mott- Hubbard material V2O3 after ultrafast laser excitation. The probed orbital excitations within the d-shell of the V ion show a sub-ps time response, which evolve at later times to a state that appears electronically indistinguishable from the high-temperature metallic state. Our results demonstrate the potential for RIXS spectroscopy to study the ultrafast orbital dynamics in strongly correlated materials.

arXiv comment12 pages, 4 figures

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Cited by in corpus (10)

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• Probing light-driven quantum materials with ultrafast resonant inelastic X-ray scattering
• Exploring Quantum Materials with Resonant Inelastic X-Ray Scattering
• Witnessing Light-Driven Entanglement using Time-Resolved Resonant Inelastic X-Ray Scattering
• Description of resonant inelastic x-ray scattering in correlated metals
• Probing the interplay between lattice dynamics and short-range magnetic correlations in CuGeO3 with femtosecond RIXS
• Fluctuation control of non-thermal orbital order
• Probing magnetic orbitals and Berry curvature with circular dichroism in resonant inelastic X-ray scattering
• Magnetization precession after non-collinear dual optical excitation
• A set-up for Hard X-ray Time-resolved Resonant Inelastic X-ray Scattering at SwissFEL