Centres de Recerca de Catalunya (CERCA)
2024-04-11
Ultrafast manipulation of vibrational coherence provides a route to control the structure of solids. However, this strategy can only induce long-range correlations and cannot modify atomic structure locally, which is a requirement for many technological applications such as non-volatile electronics. Here we demonstrate that ultrafast lasers can generate incoherent structural fluctuations that are more efficient for material control than coherent vibrations, extending optical control to a wide range of materials. We observe that local non-equilibrium lattice distortions generated by a weak laser pulse reduce the energy barrier to switch between insulating and metallic states in vanadium dioxide. Seeding inhomogeneous structural fluctuations presents an alternative, more energy-efficient, route for controlling materials that may be applicable to all solids, including those used in data- and energy-storage devices.
Article
Accepted version
English
16 p.
Springer Nature
Japan Synchrotron Radiation Research Institute (JASRI) (proposal nos. 2018A8007, 2019A8038 and 2019B8075)
ASJ acknowledges support from: ERC AdG NOQIA
MICIN/AEI (PGC2018- 0910.13039/501100011033, CEX2019-000910-S/10.13039/501100011033, PID2022-137817NA-I00, Plan National FIDEUA PID2019-106901GB-I00, FPI; MICIIN with funding from European Union NextGenerationEU (PRTR-C17.I1): QUANTERA MAQS PCI2019-111828-2); MCIN/AEI/ 10.13039/501100011033 and by the “European Union NextGeneration EU/PRTR" QUANTERA DYNAMITE PCI2022-132919 within the QuantERA II Programme that has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under Grant Agreement No 101017733Proyectos de I+D+I “Retos Colaboración” QUSPIN RTC2019-007196-7); Fundació Cellex; Fundació Mir-Puig; Generalitat de Catalunya (European Social Fund FEDER and CERCA program, AGAUR Grant No. 2021 SGR 01452, QuantumCAT \ U16-011424, co-funded by ERDF Operational Program of Catalonia 2014-2020); Barcelona Supercomputing Center MareNostrum (FI-2023-1- 0013); EU (PASQuanS2.1, 101113690); EU Horizon 2020 FET-OPEN OPTOlogic (Grant No 899794); EU Horizon Europe Program (Grant Agreement 101080086 — NeQST), National Science Centre, Poland (Symfonia Grant No. 2016/20/W/ST4/00314); ICFO Internal “QuantumGaudi” project; European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under the Marie-Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 101029393 (STREDCH) and No 847648 (“La Caixa” Junior Leaders fellowships ID100010434: LCF/BQ/PI19/11690013, LCF/BQ/PI20/11760031, LCF/BQ/PR20/11770012, LCF/BQ/PR21/11840013)
Presidencia de la Agencia Estatal de Investigación” within the PRE2020-094404 predoctoral fellowship, the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (Ref. No. PID2021-122516OB-I00, Severo Ochoa Center of Excellence CEX2019-000925-S 10.13039/501100011033).
T.K. acknowledges support from JSPS KAKENHI (grant nos. JP19H05782, JP21H04974 and JP21K18944)
E.P acknowledges the support form IJC2018-037384-I funded by MCIN/AEI /10.13039/501100011033 as well as the support from the CNRS and the French Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR), under grant ANR-22-CPJ2-0053-01. Funded/Co-funded by the European Union (ERC, PhotoDefect, 101076203)
S.K acknowledges support from National Research Foundation of Korea grant NRF- 2019R1A6B2A02100883
info:eu-repo/grantAgreement/EC/FP7/G.A.P.M., V.K., and M.T. were supported by the US Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of Basic Energy Sciences through the Division of Materials Sciences and Engineering under Contract No. DE-AC02-76SF00515.
S.E.W was supported by Carlsbergfondet (CF20-0169)
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