All-optical seeding of a light-induced phase transition with correlated disorder

Abstract

Ultrafast manipulation of vibrational coherence is an emergent route to control the structure of solids. However, this strategy can only induce long-range correlations and cannot modify atomic structure locally, which is required in many technologically-relevant phase transitions. Here, we demonstrate that ultrafast lasers can generate incoherent structural fluctuations which are more efficient for material control than coherent vibrations, extending optical control to a wider range of materials. We observe that local, non-equilibrium lattice distortions generated by a weak laser pulse reduce the energy barrier to switch between insulating and metallic states in vanadium dioxide by 6%. Seeding inhomogeneous structural-fluctuations presents an alternative, more energy efficient, route for controlling materials that may be applicable to all solids, including those used in data and energy storage devices.

References in corpus (4)

• Evidence for a Structurally-driven Insulator-to-metal Transition in VO2: a View from the Ultrafast Timescale
• Nonthermal pathways to ultrafast control in quantum materials
• Femtosecond Coherence and Quantum Control of Single Molecules at Room Temperature
• Ultrafast lattice disordering can be accelerated by electronic collisional forces

Cited by in corpus (9)

• The photoinduced hidden metallic phase of monoclinic VO2 driven by local nucleation via a self-amplification process
• Decoupled few-femtosecond phase transitions in vanadium dioxide
• Resolving Length Scale Dependent Transient Disorder Through an Ultrafast Phase Transition
• Non-thermal electrons open the non-equilibrium pathway of the phase transition in FeRh
• Megahertz cycling of ultrafast structural dynamics enabled by nanosecond thermal dissipation
• Laser-induced helicity and texture-dependent switching of nanoscale stochastic domains in a ferromagnetic film
• Light-induced phase transitions in vanadium dioxide: a tensor network study
• Ultrafast surface melting of orbital order in La0.5Sr1.5MnO4
• A versatile setup for symmetry-resolved ultrafast dynamics of quantum materials