Exciting atomic oscillations with light is a powerful technique to control the electronic properties of materials, leading to remarkable phenomena such as light-induced superconductivity and ultrafast insulator to metal transitions. Here we show that light-driven lattice vibrations can be utilised to encode efficiently spin information in a magnetic medium. Intense mid-infrared electric field pulses, tuned to resonance with a vibrational normal mode of antiferromagnetic DyFeO3, drive the emergence of long-living weak ferromagnetic order. Light-driven phonon displacements promptly lower the energy barrier separating competing magnetic states, allowing the alignment of spins to occur within a few picoseconds, via non-equilibrium dynamics of the magnetic energy landscape.
@article{arxiv.1912.01938,
title = {Light-driven ultrafast phonomagnetism},
author = {D. Afanasiev and J. R. Hortensius and B. A. Ivanov and A. Sasani and E. Bousquet and Y. M. Blanter and R. V. Mikhaylovskiy and A. V. Kimel and A. D. Caviglia},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1912.01938},
year = {2021}
}