High-harmonic spectroscopy of ultrafast many-body dynamics in strongly correlated systems

By R. E. F. Silva, I. Blinov, A. Rubtsov, O. Smirnova, Mikhail Ivanov. 2017

238 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We bring together two topics that, until now, have been the focus of intense but non-overlapping research efforts. The first concerns high-harmonic generation in solids, which occurs when an intense light field excites a highly non-equilibrium electronic response in a semiconductor or a dielectric. The second concerns many-body dynamics in strongly correlated systems such as the Mott insulator. We show that high-harmonic generation can be used to time-resolve ultrafast many-body dynamics associated with an optically driven phase transition, with accuracy far exceeding one cycle of the driving light field. Our work paves the way for time-resolving highly non-equilibrium many-body dynamics in strongly correlated systems, with few femtosecond accuracy.A highly nonlinear optical response can be used to time-resolve light-induced phase transitions with few-femtosecond to sub-femtosecond accuracy, paving the way for time-resolving highly correlated many-body dynamics in strongly correlated systems with few-femtosecond accuracy.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Physical and Theoretical Chemistry

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/5ef03794733192bc0eba1b6190c6d4fa1995c0a2