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Ultrafast manipulation of mirror domain walls in a charge density wave

Cornell Affiliated Author(s)

Author

Alfred Zong
Xiaozhe Shen
Anshul Kogar
Linda Ye
Carolyn Marks
Debanjan Chowdhury
Timm Rohwer
Byron Freelon
Stephen Weathersby
Renkai Li
Jie Yang
Joseph Checkelsky
Xijie Wang
Nuh Gedik

Abstract

Topological defects, potential information carriers, were written into and erased from a solid with femtosecond light pulses. , 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 1 T -TaS 2 . 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.

Date Published

Journal

Science Advances

Volume

4

Issue

10

ISBN Number

2375-2548

URL

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aau5501

DOI

10.1126/sciadv.aau5501

Alternate Journal

Sci. Adv.

Group (Lab)

Debanjan Chowdhury Group

Funding Source

DMR-14-19807
GBMF4540
DE-AC02-05-CH11231
DE-AC02-76SF00515
GBMF3848
GBMF4303

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