No Arabic abstract
The competition between electron localization and de-localization in Mott insulators underpins the physics of strongly-correlated electron systems. Photo-excitation, which re-distributes charge between sites, can control this many-body process on the ultrafast timescale. To date, time-resolved studies have been performed in solids in which other degrees of freedom, such as lattice, spin, or orbital excitations come into play. However, the underlying quantum dynamics of bare electronic excitations has remained out of reach. Quantum many-body dynamics have only been detected in the controlled environment of optical lattices where the dynamics are slower and lattice excitations are absent. By using nearly-single-cycle near-IR pulses, we have measured coherent electronic excitations in the organic salt ET-F2TCNQ, a prototypical one-dimensional Mott Insulator. After photo-excitation, a new resonance appears on the low-energy side of the Mott gap, which oscillates at 25 THz. Time-dependent simulations of the Mott-Hubbard Hamiltonian reproduce the oscillations, showing that electronic delocalization occurs through quantum interference between bound and ionized holon-doublon pairs.
We discuss photogenerated midgap states of a one-dimensional (1D) dimerized Mott insulator, potassium-tetracyanoquinodimethane (K-TCNQ). Two types of phonon modes are taken into account: intermolecular and intramolecular vibrations. We treat these phonon modes adiabatically and analyze a theoretical model by using the density-matrix renormalization group (DMRG). Our numerical results demonstrate that the intermolecular lattice distortion is necessary to reproduce the photoinduced midgap absorption in K-TCNQ. We find two types of midgap states. One is a usual polaronic state characterized by a localized elementary excitation. The other is superposition of two types of excitations, a doped-carrier state and a triplet-dimer state, which can be generally observed in 1D dimerized Mott insulators, not limited to K-TCNQ.
Electron--electron repulsion, on the one hand, can result in bound pair, which has heavy effective mass. On the other hand, it is also the cause of Mott insulator. We study the effect of a staggered magnetic field on a Hubbard model. We find that a bound pair with large energy bandwidth can be formed under the resonant staggered field, being the half of Hubbard repulsion strength. Accordingly, the system exhibits following dynamical behaviors: (i) When an electric field is applied, fast bound pair Bloch oscillation occurs, while a single electron is frozen. (ii) When a quenching resonant field is applied to an initial antiferromagnetic Mott insulating state, the final state becomes doublon conducting state manifested by the non-zero $eta$ correlator and large charge fluctuation. Our finding indicates that the cooperation of electron-electron correlation and modulated external field can induce novel quench dynamics.
Using a nonequilibrium implementation of the extended dynamical mean field theory (EDMFT) we simulate the relaxation after photo excitation in a strongly correlated electron system with antiferromagnetic spin interactions. We consider the $t$-$J$ model and focus on the interplay between the charge- and spin-dynamics in different excitation and doping regimes. The appearance of string states after a weak photo excitation manifests itself in a nontrivial scaling of the relaxation time with the exchange coupling and leads to a correlated oscillatory evolution of the kinetic energy and spin-spin correlation function. A strong excitation of the system, on the other hand, suppresses the spin correlations and results in a relaxation that is controlled by hole scattering. We discuss the possibility of detecting string states in optical and cold atom experiments.
In Mott insulators, the strong electron-electron Coulomb repulsion prevents metallicity and charge excitations are gapped. In dimensions greater than one, their spins are usually ordered antiferromagnetically at low temperatures. Geometrical frustrations can destroy this long-range order, leading to exotic quantum spin liquid (QSL) states. However, their magnetic ground states have been a long-standing mystery. Here we show that a QSL state in the organic Mott insulator EtMe$_3$Sb[Pd(dmit)$_2$]$_2$ with two-dimensional triangular lattice has Pauli-paramagnetic-like low-energy excitations, which are a hallmark of itinerant fermions. Our torque magnetometry down to low temperatures (30 mK) up to high fields (32 T) reveal distinct residual paramagnetic susceptibility comparable to that in a half-filled two-dimensional metal. This demonstrates that the system is in a magnetically gapless ground state, a critical state with infinite magnetic correlation length. Moreover, our results are robust against deuteration, pointing toward the emergence of an extended `quantum critical phase, in which low-energy spin excitations behave as in paramagnetic metals with Fermi surface, despite the frozen charge degree of freedom.
We examined the temperature (T) evolution of the optical conductivity spectra of Sr$_3$Ir$_2$O$_7$ over a wide range of 10-400 K. The system was barely insulating, exhibiting a small indirect bandgap of $sim$0.1 eV. The low-energy features of the optical d-d excitation (${hbar}{omega}$ $<$ 0.3 eV) evolved drastically, whereas such evolution was not observed for the O K-edge X-ray absorption spectra. This suggests that the T evolution in optical spectra is not caused by a change in the bare (undressed) electronic structure, but instead, presumably originates from an abundance of phonon-assisted indirect excitations. Our results showed that the low-energy excitations were dominated by phonon-absorption processes which involve, in particular, the optical phonons. This implies that phonon-assisted processes significantly facilitate the charge dynamics in barely insulating Sr$_3$Ir$_2$O$_7$.