All-optical seeding of a light-induced phase transition with correlated disorder

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that ultrafast lasers can induce local, incoherent lattice fluctuations in materials like vanadium dioxide, enabling more efficient control of phase transitions than traditional coherent vibrational methods.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach using incoherent structural fluctuations to control phase transitions, expanding optical control capabilities to a broader range of materials.

Findings

Incoherent lattice distortions reduce energy barriers for phase switching.

Weak laser pulses can generate local structural fluctuations.

This method is more energy-efficient than traditional coherent control.

Abstract

Ultrafast manipulation of vibrational coherence is an emergent route to control the structure of solids. However, this strategy can only induce long-range correlations and cannot modify atomic structure locally, which is required in many technologically-relevant phase transitions. Here, we demonstrate that ultrafast lasers can generate incoherent structural fluctuations which are more efficient for material control than coherent vibrations, extending optical control to a wider range of materials. We observe that local, non-equilibrium lattice distortions generated by a weak laser pulse reduce the energy barrier to switch between insulating and metallic states in vanadium dioxide by 6%. Seeding inhomogeneous structural-fluctuations presents an alternative, more energy efficient, route for controlling materials that may be applicable to all solids, including those used in data and energy storage devices.