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Changing the state of matter with a flash of light

29.10.2018

In physics there is such a concept - charge density waves. We are talking about the distribution of charge in conductors, as a rule - in metals. It is uneven: somewhere there are more electrons, somewhere there are more positively charged ions. The phenomenon is associated with the structure of the crystal lattice and, in general, is well studied.

However, "not bad" in physics never means "not at all". This is exactly what a team of scientists from the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory of the Department of Energy and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has demonstrated by finding a simple and very fast way to invert these waves. A flash of laser light is used as a "switch".

As a test material, the experimenters used tantalum disulfide. Its crystal was irradiated coherently at a wavelength of 800 nm. The pulse duration was 80 femtoseconds. The area of the irradiated sample was 150 x 150 micrometers, with a thickness of 50 nanometers.

As it turned out, under these conditions, the charge of the observed regions after each flash changes to the opposite, and after the next - back.

This holds great promise in areas such as memory design. In today's devices, information is stored and retrieved by magnetizing materials. "Here we have changed another feature of the material, known as charge density waves," says Alfred Zong, one of the study's lead authors.

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