Ultrafast optical control over spin and momentum in solids

Abstract

The coupling of laser light to matter can exert sub-cycle coherent control over material properties, with optically induced currents and magnetism shown to be controllable on ultrafast femtosecond time scales. Here, by employing laser light consisting of both linear and circular pulses, we show that charge of specified spin and crystal momentum can be created with precision throughout the first Brillouin zone. Our hybrid pulses induce in a controlled way both adiabatic intraband motion as well as vertical interband excitation between valence and conduction bands, and require only a gapped spin split valley structure for their implementation. This scenario is commonly found in the 2d semi-conductors, and we demonstrate our approach with monolayer WSe${}_2$. We thus establish a route from laser light to local control over excitations in reciprocal space, opening the way to the preparation of momenta specified excited states at ultrafast time scales.

References in corpus (2)

• Valley polarization in MoS2 monolayers by optical pumping
• Real-time exciton dynamics with time-dependent density-functional theory

Cited by in corpus (5)

• Spintronic Sources of Ultrashort Terahertz Electromagnetic Pulses
• Ab initio study of the nonlinear optical properties and d.c. photocurrent of the Weyl semimetal TaIrTe${}_4$
• A Snapshot of Time-Dependent Density-Functional Theory
• Ultrafast all-optical generation of pure spin and valley currents
• Computing Floquet quasienergies in finite and extended systems: Role of electromagnetic and quantum-geometric gauges