Ultrafast metal-to-insulator switching in a strongly correlated system

Abstract

Light-manipulation of correlated electronic phases in solids offers the tantalizing prospect of realizing electronic devices operating at the ultrafast time-scale. In this context, the experimental realization of non-equilibrium transitions from a metal to a band or Mott insulator has shown to be particularly elusive. Using dynamical mean-field theory, we study a simple model representing the main physical properties of the oxygen-enriched compound LaTiO${}_{3+x}$. By properly optimizing the photo-doping of electrons from a low-energy band into the valence states of the system, we show it is possible to induce a valence transition from a correlated metallic state to a Mott insulator at ultrashort time scales and to contain the heating during this process, with the final non-thermal valence insulator having almost the same effective temperature of the starting metal.

9 pages, 7 figures

References in corpus (5)

• Resistive switching induced by electronic avalanche breakdown in GaTa${}_4$Se${}_{8-x}$Te${}_x$ narrow gap Mott Insulators
• Magnetoelastic coupling in RETiO3 (RE = La, Nd, Sm, Gd, Y)
• Proposed parametric cooling of bilayer cuprate superconductors by terahertz excitation
• Determination of the orbital moment and crystal field splitting in LaTiO${}_3$
• The Mott insulator LaTiO_3 in heterostructures with SrTiO_3 is metallic