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 (14)

• Coupled spin and valley physics in monolayers of MoS2 and other group-VI dichalcogenides
• Control of valley polarization in monolayer MoS2 by optical helicity
• Valley polarization in MoS2 monolayers by optical pumping
• Single-cycle THz pulses with amplitudes exceeding 1 MV/cm generated by optical rectification in LiNbO3
• Light-field driven currents in graphene
• Nonequilibrium Magnetization Dynamics of Nickel
• Petahertz Spintronics
• Ultrafast transport of laser-excited spin polarized carriers in Au/Fe/MgO(001)
• Generation and evolution of spin-, valley- and layer-polarized excited carriers in inversion-symmetric WSe2
• Local Berry curvature signatures in dichroic angle-resolved photoelectron spectroscopy
• Momentum-Resolved View of Electron-Phonon Coupling in Multilayer WSe${}_2$
• Attosecond dispersive soft X-ray absorption fine structure spectroscopy in graphite
• Real-time exciton dynamics with time-dependent density-functional theory
• Coherently controlled generation of single-cycle terahertz pulses from thin layer of nonlinear medium with low-frequency resonances

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