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  • Open Access

Coherent control of the photoinduced transition in a strongly correlated material

Eduardo B. Molinero1,* and Rui E. F. Silva1,2,†

  • 1Instituto de Ciencia de Materiales de Madrid, Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (ICMM-CSIC), E-28049 Madrid, Spain
  • 2Max-Born-Institut, Max Born Strasse 2A, D-12489 Berlin, Germany

  • *ebmolinero@gmail.com
  • †rui.silva@csic.es, ruiefdasilva@gmail.com
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Phys. Rev. Research 4, 043198 – Published 19 December, 2022

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevResearch.4.043198

Abstract

The use of intense tailored light fields is the perfect tool to achieve ultrafast control of electronic properties in quantum materials. Among them, Mott insulators are materials in which strong electron-electron interactions drive the material into an insulating phase. When shining a Mott insulator with a strong laser pulse, the electric field may induce the creation of doublon-hole pairs, triggering a photoinduced transition into a metallic state. In this paper, we take advantage of the threshold character of this photoinduced transition and we propose a setup that consists of a midinfrared laser pulse and a train of short pulses separated by a half period of the midinfrared with alternating phases. By varying the time delay between the two pulses and the internal carrier envelope phase of the short pulses, we achieve control of the phase transition, which leaves its fingerprint at its high harmonic spectrum.

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Phys. Rev. Research 4, 043198– Published 19 December, 2022
  • Received 14 June 2022
  • Revised 3 October 2022
  • Accepted 18 November 2022
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Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article's title, journal citation, and DOI.

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