Bypassing the structural bottleneck in the ultrafast melting of electronic order

Abstract

The emergent properties of quantum materials, such as symmetry-broken phases and associated spectral gaps, can be effectively manipulated by ultrashort photon pulses. Impulsive optical excitation generally results in a complex non-equilibrium electron and lattice dynamics that involves multiple processes on distinct timescales, and a common conception is that for times shorter than about 100 fs the gap in the electronic spectrum is not seriously affected by lattice vibrations. Here, we directly monitor the photo-induced collapse of the spectral gap in a canonical charge-density-wave material, blue bronze Rb0.3MoO3. We find that ultra-fast (about 60 fs) vibrational disordering due to efficient hot-electron energy dissipation quenches the gap significantly faster than the typical structural bottleneck time corresponding to one half-cycle oscillation (about 315 fs) of the coherent charge-density-wave amplitude mode. This result not only demonstrates the importance of incoherent lattice motion in the photo-induced quenching of electronic order, but also resolves the perennial debate about the nature of the spectral gap in a coupled electron-lattice system.

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Cited by in corpus (9)

• Nonequilibrium Charge-Density-Wave Order Beyond the Thermal Limit
• Uniting the order and disorder dynamics in photoexcited VO2
• Ultrafast Dynamics of Bilayer and Trilayer Nickelate Superconductors
• Ultrafast Switching from the Charge Density Wave Phase to a Metastable Metallic State in 1T-TiSe${}_2$
• Skin Effect in Quadratic Lindbladian Systems: an Adjoint Fermion Approach
• Dynamic short-range correlation in photoinduced disorder phase transitions
• Exceptionally Slow, Long Range, and Non-Gaussian Critical Fluctuations Dominate the Charge Density Wave Transition
• Optical amplification in a CDW-phase of a quasi-two dimensional material
• Band-selective Holstein polaron in Luttinger liquid material A0.3MoO3 (A = K, Rb)