Andrea Cavalleri

TL;DR: Femtosecond x-ray and visible pulses were used to probe structural and electronic dynamics during an optically driven, solid-solid phase transition in VO, suggesting that, in this regime, the structural transition may not be thermally initiated.

TL;DR: Mid-infrared femtosecond pulses are used to enable coherent transport between the copper oxide planes of a cuprate superconductor, and an upper limit for the time scale needed to form the superconducting phase is estimated to be 1 to 2 picoseconds, which places stringent new constraints on the understanding of stripe order and its relation to superconductivity.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors apply ultrafast spectroscopy to establish a time-domain hierarchy between structural and electronic effects in a strongly correlated electron system, and they discuss the case of the model system, a prototypical nonmagnetic compound that exhibits cell doubling, charge localization, and a metal-insulator transition below 340 K.

TL;DR: Time-resolved X-ray diffraction measurements of the coherent atomic displacement of the lattice atoms in photoexcited bismuth close to a phase transition are reported, which leads to a subsequent loss of long-range order.

TL;DR: This work reports the ultrafast switching of the electronic phase of a magnetoresistive manganite via direct excitation of a phonon mode at 71 meV (17 THz), and reports the vibrationally driven bandgap collapse observed here, which is uniquely attributed to a large-amplitude Mn–O distortion.