Heterostructures composed of the intrinsic magnetic topological insulator MnBi2Te4 and its non-magnetic counterpart Bi2Te3 host distinct surface electronic band structures depending on the stacking order and exposed termination. Here, we probe the ultrafast dynamical response of MnBi2Te4 and MnBi4Te7 following near-infrared optical excitation using time- and angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy, and disentangle surface from bulk dynamics based on density functional theory slab calculations of the surface-projected electronic structure. We gain access to the out-of-equilibrium charge carrier populations of both MnBi2Te4 and Bi2Te3 surface terminations of MnBi4Te7, revealing an instantaneous occupation of states associated with the Bi2Te3 surface layer followed by carrier extraction into the adjacent MnBi2Te4 layers with a laser fluence-tunable delay of up to 350 fs. The ensuing thermal relaxation processes are driven by phonon scattering with significantly slower relaxation times in the magnetic MnBi2Te4 septuple layers. The observed competition between interlayer charge transfer and intralayer phonon scattering demonstrates a method to control ultrafast charge transfer processes in MnBi2Te4-based van der Waals compounds.
@article{arxiv.2208.04098,
title = {Van der Waals engineering of ultrafast carrier dynamics in magnetic heterostructures},
author = {Paulina Majchrzak and Yuntian Liu and Klara Volckaert and Deepnarayan Biswas and Chakradhar Sahoo and Denny Puntel and Wibke Bronsch and Manuel Tuniz and Federico Cilento and Xing-Chen Pan and Qihang Liu and Yong P. Chen and Søren Ulstrup},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2208.04098},
year = {2024}
}
Comments
This document (21 pages, 4 figures) is the Accepted Manuscript version of a Published Work that appeared in final form in Nano Lett. 2023, 23, 2, 414-421, Copyright {\copyright} 2023 American Chemical Society after peer review. To access the final edited and published work see https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.nanolett.2c03075