Non-equilibrium pathways to emergent polar supertextures
Abstract
Ultrafast stimuli can stabilize metastable states of matter inaccessible by equilibrium means. Establishing the spatiotemporal link between ultrafast excitation and metastability is crucial to understanding these phenomena. Here, we use single-shot optical-pump, X-ray-probe measurements to provide snapshots of the emergence of a persistent polar vortex supercrystal in a heterostructure that hosts a fine balance between built-in electrostatic and elastic frustrations by design. By perturbing this balance with photoinduced charges, a starting heterogenous mixture of polar phases disorders within a few picoseconds, resulting in a soup state composed of disordered ferroelectric and suppressed vortex orders. On the pico-to-nanosecond timescales, transient labyrinthine fluctuations form in this soup along with a recovering vortex order. On longer timescales, these fluctuations are progressively quenched by dynamical strain modulations, which drive the collective emergence of a single supercrystal phase. Our results, corroborated by dynamical phase-field modeling, reveal how ultrafast excitation of designer systems generates pathways for persistent metastability.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2402.11634,
title = {Non-equilibrium pathways to emergent polar supertextures},
author = {Vladimir A. Stoica and Tiannan Yang and Sujit Das and Yue Cao and Huaiyu Wang and Yuya Kubota and Cheng Dai and Hari Padmanabhan and Yusuke Sato and Anudeep Mangu and Quynh L. Nguyen and Zhan Zhang and Disha Talreja and Marc E. Zajac and Donald A. Walko and Anthony D. DiChiara and Shigeki Owada and Kohei Miyanishi and Kenji Tamasaku and Takahiro Sato and James M. Glownia and Vincent Esposito and Silke Nelson and Matthias C. Hoffmann and Richard D. Schaller and Aaron M. Lindenberg and Lane W. Martin and Ramamoorthy Ramesh and Iwao Matsuda and Diling Zhu and Long-Q. Chen and Haidan Wen and Venkatraman Gopalan and John W. Freeland},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2402.11634},
year = {2024}
}