No Arabic abstract
We investigate the effect of nonlocal interactions on the photo-doped Mott insulating state of the two-dimensional Hubbard model using a nonequilibrium generalization of the dynamical cluster approximation. In particular, we compare the situation where the excitonic states are lying within the continuum of doublon-holon excitations to a set-up where the excitons appear within the Mott gap. In the first case, the creation of nearest-neighbor doublon-holon pairs by excitations across the Mott gap results in enhanced excitonic correlations, but these excitons quickly decay into uncorrelated doublons and holons. In the second case, photo-excitation results in long-lived excitonic states. While in a low-temperature equilibrium state, excitonic features are usually not evident in single-particle observables such as the photoemission spectrum, we show that the photo-excited nonequilibrium system can exhibit in-gap states associated with the excitons. The comparison with exact-diagonalization results for small clusters allows us to identify the signatures of the excitons in the photo-emission spectrum.
The excitonic insulator is an intriguing correlated electron phase formed of condensed excitons. A promising candidate is the small band gap semiconductor Ta2NiSe5. Here we investigate the quasiparticle and coherent phonon dynamics in Ta2NiSe5 in a time resolved pump probe experiment. Using the models originally developed by Kabanov et al. for superconductors, we show that the materials intrinsic gap can be described as almost temperature independent for temperatures up to about 250 K to 275 K. This behavior supports the existence of the excitonic insulator state in Ta2NiSe5. The onset of an additional temperature dependent component to the gap above these temperatures suggests that the material is located in the BEC-BCS crossover regime. Furthermore, we show that this state is very stable against strong photoexcitation, which reveals that the free charge carriers are unable to effectively screen the attractive Coulomb interaction between electrons and holes, likely due to the quasi one-dimensional structure of Ta2NiSe5.
We study the photo-induced dynamics of the excitonic insulator in the two-band Hubbard model on the Penrose tiling by means of the time-dependent real-space mean-field approximation. We show that, with a single-cycle electric-field pulse, the bulk (spatially averaged) excitonic order parameter decreases in the BCS regime, while it increases in the BEC regime. To clarify the dynamics peculiar to the Penrose tiling, we examine the coordination number dependence of observables and analyze the perpendicular space. In the BEC regime, characteristic oscillations of the electron number at each site are induced by the pulse, which are not observed in normal crystals. On the other hand, the dynamics in the BCS regime is characterized by drastic change in the spatial pattern of the excitonic order parameter.
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.
Measuring how the magnetic correlations throughout the Brillouin zone evolve in a Mott insulator as charges are introduced dramatically improved our understanding of the pseudogap, non-Fermi liquids and high $T_C$ superconductivity. Recently, photoexcitation has been used to induce similarly exotic states transiently. However, understanding how these states emerge has been limited because of a lack of available probes of magnetic correlations in the time domain, which hinders further investigation of how light can be used to control the properties of solids. Here we implement magnetic resonant inelastic X-ray scattering at a free electron laser, and directly determine the magnetization dynamics after photo-doping the Mott insulator Sr$_2$IrO$_4$. We find that the non-equilibrium state 2~ps after the excitation has strongly suppressed long-range magnetic order, but hosts photo-carriers that induce strong, non-thermal magnetic correlations. The magnetism recovers its two-dimensional (2D) in-plane Neel correlations on a timescale of a few ps, while the three-dimensional (3D) long-range magnetic order restores over a far longer, fluence-dependent timescale of a few hundred ps. The dramatic difference in these two timescales, implies that characterizing the dimensionality of magnetic correlations will be vital in our efforts to understand ultrafast magnetic dynamics.
We study the nonequilibrium phase diagram of long-lived photo-doped states in the one-dimensional $U$-$V$ Hubbard model, where $eta$-pairing, spin density wave and charge density wave (CDW) phases are found. The photo-doped states are studied using an effective model obtained by a Schrieffer-Wolff transformation combined with separate chemical potentials for the approximately conserved pseudoparticle excitations, leading to a generalized Gibbs ensemble type description. These photo-doped states are characterized by gapless ($eta$-paring) and gapped (CDW) features in the nonequilibrium spectra. For small $V$, the $eta$-pairing correlations dominate over a wide doping range even when the SU$_c(2)$ symmetry that protects $eta$-pairing in the pure Hubbard model is absent. With increasing $V$, the CDW correlations take over in a wide doping range and are strong relative to the chemically doped case. We attribute the strong CDW correlations to the competition between intra- and inter-species repulsion and the one-dimensional configuration. Our results show that photo-doped strongly correlated systems exhibit different phases than conventional semiconductors.