Han Tzong-Ru T, Zhou Faran, Malliakas Christos D, Duxbury Phillip M, Mahanti Subhendra D, Kanatzidis Mercouri G, Ruan Chong-Yu
Department of Physics and Astronomy, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI 48824, USA.
Department of Chemistry, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL 60208, USA. ; Materials Science Division, Argonne National Laboratory, Argonne, IL 60439, USA.
Sci Adv. 2015 Jun 26;1(5):e1400173. doi: 10.1126/sciadv.1400173. eCollection 2015 Jun.
Characterizing and understanding the emergence of multiple macroscopically ordered electronic phases through subtle tuning of temperature, pressure, and chemical doping has been a long-standing central issue for complex materials research. We report the first comprehensive studies of optical doping-induced emergence of stable phases and metastable hidden phases visualized in situ by femtosecond electron crystallography. The electronic phase transitions are triggered by femtosecond infrared pulses, and a temperature-optical density phase diagram is constructed and substantiated with the dynamics of metastable states, highlighting the cooperation and competition through which the macroscopic quantum orders emerge. These results elucidate key pathways of femtosecond electronic switching phenomena and provide an important new avenue to comprehensively investigate optical doping-induced transition states and phase diagrams of complex materials with wide-ranging applications.
通过对温度、压力和化学掺杂进行微调来表征和理解多种宏观有序电子相的出现，一直是复杂材料研究中长期存在的核心问题。我们报告了首次通过飞秒电子晶体学对光学掺杂诱导的稳定相和亚稳隐藏相的出现进行原位可视化的综合研究。电子相变由飞秒红外脉冲触发，并构建了温度-光密度相图，并用亚稳态的动力学加以证实，突出了宏观量子序出现时的协同与竞争。这些结果阐明了飞秒电子开关现象的关键途径，并为全面研究光学掺杂诱导的过渡态以及具有广泛应用的复杂材料的相图提供了一条重要的新途径。
