Evidence for metastable photo-induced superconductivity in K3C60
By M. Budden, Thomas Gebert, M. Buzzi, G. Jotzu, E. Wang, T. Matsuyama, G. Meier, Y. Laplace, D. Pontiroli, M. Riccò and 3 more. Nature Physics, 2020
182 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Excitation of high-Tc cuprates and certain organic superconductors with intense far-infrared optical pulses has been shown to create non-equilibrium states with optical properties that are consistent with transient high-temperature superconductivity. These non-equilibrium phases have been generated using femtosecond drives, and have been observed to disappear immediately after excitation, which is evidence of states that lack intrinsic rigidity. Here we make use of a new optical device to drive metallic K3C60 with mid-infrared pulses of tunable duration, ranging between one picosecond and one nanosecond. The same superconducting-like optical properties observed over short time windows for femtosecond excitation are shown here to become metastable under sustained optical driving, with lifetimes in excess of ten nanoseconds. Direct electrical probing, which becomes possible at these timescales, yields a vanishingly small resistance with the same relaxation time as that estimated by terahertz conductivity. We provide a theoretical description of the dynamics after excitation, and justify the observed slow relaxation by considering randomization of the order-parameter phase as the rate-limiting process that determines the decay of the light-induced superconductor. Evidence for light-induced superconductivity in K3C60 was limited to optical methods due to the short lifetime of the phase. Extending the lifetime from picoseconds to nanoseconds now allows measurement of its negligible electrical resistance.
Subfields: Condensed Matter Physics, Electronic, Optical and Magnetic Materials, Organic Chemistry
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/fb9eba97bd46230ebce1ff00b7afbabd3e51ef1b
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Citations in the corpus
- Colloquium: Nonthermal pathways to ultrafast control in quantum materials (2021, background): “Similarly, advances in optical switching of superconductors (Budden et al., 2021) could be integrated in future microelectronics.”