Date: 03.11.2023, Time: 15:30h

Location: Kleiner Physikhörsaal N020, Faculty of Physics
The talk will also be streamed online.

Prof. Matteo Mitrano
Harvard University

Over the last two decades, intense ultrashort electromagnetic fields have enabled observing and controlling a number of emergent states in quantum materials. Some of most spectacular light-induced phenomena, such as superconducting-like phases, transient charge density wave ordering, and excitonic condensation, are found to occur in materials dominated by strong electronic correlations with a large susceptibility to external stimuli. A major need towards developing a microscopic understanding of these states of matter is the capability to directly measure their transient electronic dynamics and effective interactions. In this talk, I will show how novel ultrafast x-ray spectroscopic methods, such as time-resolved x-ray absorption (trXAS) and time-resolved resonant inelastic x-ray scattering (trRIXS), enable tackling these questions with unprecedented detail [1]. I will particularly focus on light-driven Mott insulators, which are key to the emergence of light-induced superconductivity and are theoretically argued to host other exotic ordering phenomena upon photoexcitation, such as h-pairing condensation. I will discuss how trXAS allows to accurately determine transient effective electronic interactions in 1D and 2D copper oxides, and how we can fully reconstruct the driven many-body state from the transient absorption spectrum [2,3]. Further, I will discuss how advances in trRIXS [1,4,5] enable mapping the excitation spectrum of the driven state, and the implications of these experiments for the realization of new light-induced states in photoexcited Mott insulators.

[1] M Mitrano & Y. Wang, Commun. Phys. 3, 184 (2020)
[2] D. R. Baykusheva, et al., Phys. Rev. X 12, 011013 (2022)
[3] D. R. Baykusheva, et al., forthcoming (2023)
[4] M. Mitrano, et al., Sci. Adv. 5, eaax3346 (2019)
[5] Y. Wang, et al., Commun. Phys. 4, 212 (2021)