Regensburg 2022 – scientific programme

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TT: Fachverband Tiefe Temperaturen

TT 36: Focus Session: Ultrafast Spin, Lattice and Charge Dynamics of Solids

TT 36.3: Invited Talk

Friday, September 9, 2022, 10:30–11:00, H10

Coherent electronic control of an insulator-to-metal transition — •Claudio Giannetti, Paolo Franceschini, and Alessandra Milloch — Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Brescia (Italy)

Managing light-matter interaction on timescales faster than the loss of electronic coherence is key for achieving the full quantum control of final products in solid-solid transformations. Here, we demonstrate coherent electronic control of the photoinduced insulator-to-metal transition in the prototypical Mott insulator V₂O₃. Selective excitation of a specific interband transition with two phase-locked light pulses manipulates the orbital occupation of the correlated bands in a way that depends on the coherent evolution of the photoinduced superposition of states.

Comparison between experimental results and numerical solutions of the optical Bloch equations indicates an electronic coherence time on the order of 5 fs. Temperature dependent experiments suggest that the electronic coherence time is enhanced in the vicinity of the insulator-to-metal transition critical temperature, thus highlighting the role of fluctuations in determining the electronic coherence. These results open new routes to selectively switch functionalities of quantum materials and store quantum information in solid-solid transformations.