The strongest interaction between microscopic spins in magnetic materials is the exchange interaction $J_text{ex}$. Therefore, ultrafast control of $J_text{ex}$ holds the promise to control spins on ultimately fast timescales. We demonstrate that tim
e-periodic modulation of the electronic structure by electric fields can be used to reversibly control $J_text{ex}$ on ultrafast timescales in extended antiferromagnetic Mott insulators. In the regime of weak driving strength, we find that $J_text{ex}$ can be enhanced and reduced for frequencies below and above the Mott gap, respectively. Moreover, for strong driving strength, even the sign of $J_text{ex}$ can be reversed and we show that this causes time reversal of the associated quantum spin dynamics. These results suggest wide applications, not only to control magnetism in condensed matter systems, for example, via the excitation of spin resonances, but also to assess fundamental questions concerning the reversibility of the quantum many-body dynamics in cold atom systems.
We investigate how fast and how effective photocarrier excitation can modify the exchange interaction $J_mathrm{ex}$ in the prototype Mott-Hubbard insulator. We demonstrate an ultrafast quenching of $J_mathrm{ex}$ both by evaluating exchange integral
s from a time-dependent response formalism and by explicitly simulating laser-induced spin precession in an antiferromagnet that is canted by an external magnetic field. In both cases, the electron dynamics is obtained from nonequilibrium dynamical mean-field theory. We find that the modified $J_mathrm{ex}$ emerges already within a few electron hopping times after the pulse, with a reduction that is comparable to the effect of chemical doping.
We propose new semi-implicit numerical methods for the integration of the stochastic Landau-Lifshitz equation with built-in angular momentum conservation. The performance of the proposed integrators is tested on the 1D Heisenberg chain. For this syst
em, our schemes show better stability properties and allow us to use considerably larger time steps than standard explicit methods. At the same time, these semi-implicit schemes are also of comparable accuracy to and computationally much cheaper than the standard midpoint implicit method. The results are of key importance for atomistic spin dynamics simulations and the study of spin dynamics beyond the macro spin approximation.
