Ultrafast manipulation of mirror domain walls in a charge density wave
Abstract
Domain walls (DWs) are singularities in an ordered medium that often host exotic phenomena such as charge ordering, insulator-metal transition, or superconductivity. The ability to locally write and erase DWs is highly desirable, as it allows one to design material functionality by patterning DWs in specific configurations. We demonstrate such capability at room temperature in a charge density wave (CDW), a macroscopic condensate of electrons and phonons, in ultrathin 1T-TaS₂. A single femtosecond light pulse is shown to locally inject or remove mirror DWs in the CDW condensate, with probabilities tunable by pulse energy and temperature. Using time-resolved electron diffraction, we are able to simultaneously track anti-synchronized CDW amplitude oscillations from both the lattice and the condensate, where photoinjected DWs lead to a red-shifted frequency. Our demonstration of reversible DW manipulation may pave new ways for engineering correlated material systems with light.
Copyright and License
© 2018 The Authors, some rights reserved; exclusive licensee American Association for the Advancement of Science. No claim to original U.S. Government Works. Distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial License 4.0 (CC BY-NC).
Acknowledgement
We thank E. Baldini for insightful discussions. A.Z. and A.K. thank Y. Zhang for assisting the SAD measurement at the MRSEC Shared Experimental Facilities at MIT, supported by the NSF under award number DMR-14-19807.
Funding
N.G., A.Z., A.K., T.R., and B.F. acknowledge support from the U.S. Department of Energy, Basic Energy Sciences (BES) DMSE (keV UED at MIT), and from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation's EPiQS Initiative (grant GBMF4540) (data analysis and manuscript writing). X.W., X.S., S.W., R.L., and J.Y. acknowledge support from the U.S. Department of Energy BES SUF Division Accelerator and Detector R&D program, the LCLS Facility, and SLAC under contract DE-AC02-05-CH11231 and DE-AC02-76SF00515 (MeV UED at SLAC). J.C. and L.Y. acknowledge support from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation EPiQS Initiative (grant GBMF3848) (sample growth and characterization). D.C. acknowledges the postdoctoral fellowship support from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, under the EPiQS Initiative (grant GBMF4303), at MIT (data interpretation).
Contributions
A.Z. and X.S. performed the MeV UED experiment and analyzed the data. A.Z. and A.K. performed the keV UED experiment and the SAD measurement. L.Y. grew and characterized the single crystal, supervised by J.C. C.M. and A.K. prepared the TEM sample. X.W., X.S., S.W., R.L., and J.Y. developed the MeV UED setup. N.G., B.F., T.R., A.Z., and A.K. developed the keV UED setup. A.Z. wrote the manuscript with crucial inputs from X.S., A.K., D.C., X.W., N.G., and all other authors. This project was supervised by N.G.
Data Availability
All data needed to evaluate the conclusions in the paper are present in the paper and/or the Supplementary Materials. Additional data related to this paper may be requested from the authors.
Conflict of Interest
The authors declare that they have no competing interests.
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Additional details
- PMCID
- PMC6195337
- National Science Foundation
- DMR-1419807
- Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation
- GBMF4540
- United States Department of Energy
- DE-AC02-05-CH11231
- United States Department of Energy
- DE-AC02-76SF00515
- Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation
- GBMF3848
- Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation
- GBMF-4303