Giant THz photoconductivity and possible non-equilibrium superconductivity in metallic K3C60
By M. Mitrano, A. Cantaluppi, D. Nicoletti, S. Kaiser, A. Perucchi, S. Lupi, P. Pietro, D. Pontiroli, M. Riccò, A. Subedi and 3 more. Nature, 2015
617 citations recorded by the source corpus.
The non-equilibrium control of emergent phenomena in solids is an important research frontier, encompassing effects such as the optical enhancement of superconductivity. Nonlinear excitation of certain phonons in bilayer copper oxides was recently shown to induce superconducting-like optical properties at temperatures far greater than the superconducting transition temperature, Tc (refs 4, 5, 6). This effect was accompanied by the disruption of competing charge-density-wave correlations, which explained some but not all of the experimental results. Here we report a similar phenomenon in a very different compound, K3C60. By exciting metallic K3C60 with mid-infrared optical pulses, we induce a large increase in carrier mobility, accompanied by the opening of a gap in the optical conductivity. These same signatures are observed at equilibrium when cooling metallic K3C60 below Tc (20 kelvin). Although optical techniques alone cannot unequivocally identify non-equilibrium high-temperature superconductivity, we propose this as a possible explanation of our results.
Subfields: Electronic, Optical and Magnetic Materials, Geophysics, Organic Chemistry
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/34f45beb4e38de1fa7d114edc0b2cdfe3e8ee509
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Citations in the corpus
- Colloquium: Nonthermal pathways to ultrafast control in quantum materials (2021, background): “To exemplify the universality of optical switching and to acknowledge their relevance within the ultrafast condensed matter field, we highlight here the three following research directions: (i) lightinduced insulator-to-metal transitions in nanofabricated (Liu et al., 2012) and pristine samples of t”
- Dynamical Cooper pairing in nonequilibrium electron-phonon systems (2015, background): “Even though we are not studying a specific material from first principles, let us estimate the typical order of magnitude of the discussed effects for a recent experiment in which transient nonequilibrium superconductivity has been explored in K3C60 fullerides [21].”
- Light-driven ultrafast phonomagnetism (2019, background): “Recently, selective excitation of elementary vibrations of the crystal lattice (phonons) by ultrashort pulses of light has emerged as a novel, low-energy route to control material properties, extending strain engineering to the ultrafast timescales [6–12].”