An effective magnetic field from optically driven phonons

By T. Nova, A. Cartella, A. Cantaluppi, M. Först, D. Bossini, R. Mikhaylovskiy, Alexey V. Kimel, Roberto Merlin, A. Cavalleri. Nature Physics, 2015

350 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Light can be used to directly excite phonon modes in condensed matter. Simultaneously exciting several modes in an antiferromagnetic rare-earth orthoferrite drives behaviour that mimics the application of a magnetic field. Light fields at terahertz and mid-infrared frequencies allow for the direct excitation of collective modes in condensed matter, which can be driven to large amplitudes. For example, excitation of the crystal lattice1,2 has been shown to stimulate insulator–metal transitions3,4, melt magnetic order5,6 or enhance superconductivity7,8,9. Here, we generalize these ideas and explore the simultaneous excitation of more than one lattice mode, which are driven with controlled relative phases. This nonlinear mode mixing drives rotations as well as displacements of the crystal-field atoms, mimicking the application of a magnetic field and resulting in the excitation of spin precession in the rare-earth orthoferrite ErFeO3. Coherent control of lattice rotations may become applicable to other interesting problems in materials research—for example, as a way to affect the topology of electronic phases.

Subfields: Condensed Matter Physics, Electronic, Optical and Magnetic Materials

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/78b97d7c7533ed502c97a2a0923bd11cbd55e191

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Citations in the corpus

Light-driven ultrafast phonomagnetism (2019, background): “Although pioneering experiments have demonstrated that driving optical phonons can affect magnetism [13, 14], no switching of the spin orientation and light-induced magnetic symmetry breaking has been shown so far.”
Colloquium: Nonthermal pathways to ultrafast control in quantum materials (2021, background): “, 2010a), magnetic moment precession, (Afanasiev et al., 2021; Disa et al., 2020; Nova et al., 2017; Stupakiewicz et al., 2021), and the relaxation dynamics of superconductors, and light-induced superconducting-like states (Cremin et al.”
Orbital magnetic moments of phonons (2018, background): “We expect that the orbital magnetic moments of phonons should be observable with modern experimental techniques, for example indirectly via Faraday rotation measurements that are able to detect small changes in electronic magnetic order [25], or directly via nitrogenvacancy center magnetometry [42–4”
Nonlinear light–matter interaction at terahertz frequencies (2016, methodology): “The induced breaking of time-reversal invariance through this lattice rotation was shown to mimic the application of a magnetic field and manifested itself in the excitation of largeamplitude spin precession [172].”
Dynamical Multiferroicity (2016, methodology): “Our calculated values for the highest IR phonon frequencies are 16.52 THz for the B3u and 15.95 THz for the B2u mode in ErFeO3.”