Ultrafast manipulation of mirror domain walls in a charge density wave

Domain walls (DWs) are singularities in an ordered medium that often host exotic phenomena such as charge ordering, insulator-metal transition, or superconductivity. The ability to locally write and erase DWs is highly desirable, as it allows one to design material functionality by patterning DWs in...

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Bibliografische gegevens
Hoofdauteurs: Shen, Xiaozhe, Marks, Carolyn, Weathersby, Stephen, Li, Renkai, Yang, Jie, Wang, Xijie, Zong, Guo, Kogar, Anshul, Ye, Linda, Chowdhury, Debanjan, Rohwer, Timm, Freelon, Byron, Checkelsky, Joseph, Gedik, Nuh
Andere auteurs: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Physics
Formaat: Artikel
Gepubliceerd in: American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) 2019
Online toegang:http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/120949
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7949-1356
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1772-4481
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7561-5611
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0325-5204
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6394-4987
Omschrijving
Samenvatting:Domain walls (DWs) are singularities in an ordered medium that often host exotic phenomena such as charge ordering, insulator-metal transition, or superconductivity. The ability to locally write and erase DWs is highly desirable, as it allows one to design material functionality by patterning DWs in specific configurations. We demonstrate such capability at room temperature in a charge density wave (CDW), a macroscopic condensate of electrons and phonons, in ultrathin 1T-TaS₂. A single femtosecond light pulse is shown to locally inject or remove mirror DWs in the CDW condensate, with probabilities tunable by pulse energy and temperature. Using time-resolved electron diffraction, we are able to simultaneously track anti-synchronized CDW amplitude oscillations from both the lattice and the condensate, where photoinjected DWs lead to a red-shifted frequency. Our demonstration of reversible DW manipulation may pave new ways for engineering correlated material systems with light.