Ultrafast Switching to a Stable Hidden Quantum State in an Electronic Crystal
By L. Stojchevska, I. Vaskivskyi, T. Mertelj, P. Kusar, D. Svetin, Serguei Brazovskii, D. Mihailovic. Science, 2014
669 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Exposing a Hidden State Shining intense laser light on a material can temporarily alter its properties. The effect usually subsides after a few picoseconds, unless the system is trapped in a metastable state, in which case the transient period may last as long as microseconds. Stojchevska et al. (p. 177) observed that, following exposure to a 35-femtosecond laser pulse, the layered dichalcogenide 1T-TaS2 entered a stable “hidden” state not present in the equilibrium phase diagram and stayed there indefinitely. The switch to the hidden state could be reversed by heat or a train of laser pulses. Because the switch alters the sample's conducting properties, the phenomenon might also lead to practical applications. A 35-femtosecond laser pulse causes the dichalcogenide 1T-TaS2 to enter a stable phase not present in the equilibrium phase diagram. Hidden states of matter may be created if a system out of equilibrium follows a trajectory to a state that is inaccessible or does not exist under normal equilibrium conditions. We found such a hidden (H) electronic state in a layered dichalcogenide crystal of 1T-TaS2 (the trigonal phase of tantalum disulfide) reached as a result of a quench caused by a single 35-femtosecond laser pulse. In comparison to other states of the system, the H state exhibits a large drop of electrical resistance, strongly modified single-particle and collective-mode spectra, and a marked change of optical reflectivity. The H state is stable until a laser pulse, electrical current, or thermal erase procedure is applied, causing it to revert to the thermodynamic ground state.
Subfields: Electronic, Optical and Magnetic Materials, Materials Chemistry, Polymers and Plastics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/22128151a0b913b650b01f5e9c68535b3e35f74e
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In Electronic, Optical and Magnetic Materials
Citations in the corpus
- Ultrafast optical spectroscopy of strongly correlated materials and high-temperature superconductors: a non-equilibrium approach (2016, background): “One seminal example of such a mechanism has been recently reported in TaS2 [486], where a transition towards a stable hidden phase in the material can be obtained through the sudden quench driven by ∼35 fs light pulses.”
- Colloquium: Nonthermal pathways to ultrafast control in quantum materials (2021, background): “…degrees of freedom in iron-based superconductors (Gerber et al., 2017), ultrafast switching into hidden phases in transition-metal dichalcogenides (Stojchevska et al., 2014), dynamically controlled microscopic interactions in correlated transition-metal oxides (Först, Manzoni et al., 2011),…”