We report the observation of an emergent charge order mode in the optically-excited cuprate ladder Sr14Cu24O41. Near-infrared light in the ladder plane drives a symmetry-protected electronic metastable state together with a partial melting of the equilibrium charge order. Our time-resolved resonant inelastic x-ray scattering measurements at the upper Hubbard band reveal a gapless collective excitation dispersing from the charge-order wavevector up to 0.8 eV with a slope on the order of the quasiparticle velocity. These findings reveal a regime where correlated carriers acquire itinerant character at finite momentum, and charge order becomes dynamically fluctuating, offering a platform to explore light-induced pairing instabilities.
@article{arxiv.2510.24686,
title = {A light-induced charge order mode in a metastable cuprate ladder},
author = {Hari Padma and Prakash Sharma and Sophia F. R. TenHuisen and Filippo Glerean and Antoine Roll and Pan Zhou and Sarbajaya Kundu and Arnau Romaguera and Elizabeth Skoropata and Hiroki Ueda and Biaolong Liu and Eugenio Paris and Yu Wang and Seng Huat Lee and Zhiqiang Mao and Mark P. M. Dean and Edwin W. Huang and Elia Razzoli and Yao Wang and Matteo Mitrano},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2510.24686},
year = {2026}
}
Comments
Main Text with 8 pages, 3 figures, and Supplementary Material with 13 pages, 7 figures