Tunable Spatiotemporal Orders in Driven Insulators

TY - JOUR

T1 - Tunable Spatiotemporal Orders in Driven Insulators

AU - Kaplan, Daniel

AU - Volkov, Pavel A.

AU - Chakraborty, Ahana

AU - Zhuang, Zekun

AU - Chandra, Premala

N1 - Publisher Copyright: © 2025 American Physical Society.

PY - 2025/2/14

Y1 - 2025/2/14

N2 - We show that driving optical phonons above a threshold fluence induces spatiotemporal orders, where material properties oscillate at an incommensurate wave vector q0 in space and at half the drive frequency in time. The order is robust against temperature on timescales much larger than the lifetime of the excited modes and can be accompanied by a static 2q0 modulation. We make predictions for time-resolved diffraction and provide estimates for candidate materials. Our results show the possibility of using THz waves in solids to realize tunable incommensurate orders on the nanoscale.

AB - We show that driving optical phonons above a threshold fluence induces spatiotemporal orders, where material properties oscillate at an incommensurate wave vector q0 in space and at half the drive frequency in time. The order is robust against temperature on timescales much larger than the lifetime of the excited modes and can be accompanied by a static 2q0 modulation. We make predictions for time-resolved diffraction and provide estimates for candidate materials. Our results show the possibility of using THz waves in solids to realize tunable incommensurate orders on the nanoscale.

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U2 - 10.1103/PhysRevLett.134.066902

DO - 10.1103/PhysRevLett.134.066902

M3 - Article

C2 - 40021154

SN - 0031-9007

VL - 134

JO - Physical review letters

JF - Physical review letters

IS - 6

M1 - 066902

ER -