Related papers: Direct characterization of photo-induced lattice d…
The electronic and structural properties of a material are strongly determined by its symmetry. Changing the symmetry via a photoinduced phase transition offers new ways to manipulate material properties on ultrafast timescales. However, in…
Excursions far from their equilibrium structures can bring crystalline solids through collective transformations including transitions into new phases that may be transient or long-lived. Direct spectroscopic observation of…
In the prevalent picture of ultrafast structural phase transitions, the atomic motion occurs in a slowly varying potential energy surface determined adiabatically by the fast electrons. However, this ignores non-conservative forces caused…
Formation of electronic nematicity is a common thread of unconventional superconductors. In iron-based materials, the long-range nematic order is revealed by the orthorhombic lattice distortion, which importance is a highly controversial…
Light-matter interaction at the nanoscale in magnetic alloys and heterostructures is a topic of intense research in view of potential applications in high-density magnetic recording. While the element-specific dynamics of electron spins is…
We use ultrafast electron crystallography to study structural changes induced in graphite by a femtosecond laser pulse. At moderate fluences of ~< 21mJ/cm^2, lattice vibrations are observed to thermalize on a time scale of ~8ps. At higher…
There is growing interest in using ultrafast light pulses to drive functional materials into nonequilibrium states with novel properties. The conventional wisdom is that above gap photoexcitation behaves similarly to raising the electronic…
Inelastic neutron scattering measurements are presented which show the abrupt development of new oxygen lattice vibrations near the doping-induced metal-insulator transition in La(2-x)Sr(x)CuO(4). A direct correlation is established between…
Time- and angle-resolved extreme ultraviolet photoemission spectroscopy is used to study the electronic structure dynamics in BaFe$_2$As$_2$ around the high-symmetry points $\Gamma$ and $M$. A global oscillation of the Fermi level at the…
Direct visualization of ultrafast coupling between charge carriers and lattice degrees of freedom in photo-excited semiconductors has remained a long-standing challenge and is critical for understanding the light-induced physical behavior…
The emergent properties of quantum materials, such as symmetry-broken phases and associated spectral gaps, can be effectively manipulated by ultrashort photon pulses. Impulsive optical excitation generally results in a complex…
The electronic nematic phase is an unconventional state of matter that spontaneously breaks the rotational symmetry of electrons. In iron-pnictides/chalcogenides and cuprates, the nematic ordering and fluctuations have been suggested to…
We use an x-ray free-electron laser to study the ultrafast lattice dynamics following above band-gap photoexcitation of the incipient ferroelectric potassium-tantalate, \kto. % We use ultrafast near-UV (central wavelength 266\,nm and 50 fs…
Photo-excitation is a very powerful way to instantaneously drive a material into a novel quantum state without any fabrication, and variable ultrafast techniques have been developed to observe how electron-, lattice-, and spin-degrees of…
The interplay among charge, spin and lattice degrees of freedom in solids gives rise to intriguing macroscopic quantum phenomena such as colossal magnetoresistance, multiferroicity and high-temperature superconductivity. Strong coupling or…
The transition between different states in manganites can be driven by various external stimuli. Controlling these transitions with light opens the possibility to investigate the microscopic path through which they evolve. We performed…
Exciting electrons in solids with intense light pulses offers the possibility of generating new states of matter through nonthermal means and controlling their macroscopic properties on femto- to picosecond timescales. One way to manipulate…
Resonant optical excitation of apical oxygen vibrational modes in the normal state of underdoped YBa2Cu3O6+x induces a transient state with optical properties similar to those of the equilibrium superconducting state. Amongst these, a…
Intense, few-cycle pulses in the terahertz frequency range have strong potential for schemes of control over vibrational modes in solid-state materials in the electronic ground-state. Here we report an experiment using single cycle…
Optical control of magnetism, of interest for high-speed data processing and storage, has only been demonstrated with near-infrared excitation to date. However, in absorbing materials, such high photon energies can lead to significant…