Non-equilibrium pathways to emergent polar supertextures

Stoica, VA and Yang, T and Das, S and Cao, Y and Wang, H and Kubota, Y and Dai, C and Padma, H and Sato, Y and Mangu, A and Nguyen, QL and Zhang, Z and Talreja, D and Zajac, ME and Walko, DA and DiChiara, AD and Owada, S and Miyanishi, K and Tamasaku, K and Sato, T and Glownia, JM and Esposito, V and Nelson, S and Hoffmann, MC and Schaller, RD and Lindenberg, AM and Martin, LW and Ramesh, R and Matsuda, I and Zhu, D and Chen, L-Q and Wen, H and Gopalan, V and Freeland, JW (2024) Non-equilibrium pathways to emergent polar supertextures. In: Nature Materials, 23 (10). pp. 1394-1401.

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Abstract

Ultrafast stimuli can stabilize metastable states of matter inaccessible by equilibrium means. Establishing the spatiotemporal link between ultrafast excitation and metastability is crucial to understand these phenomena. Here we utilize single-shot optical pump�X-ray probe measurements to capture snapshots of the emergence of a persistent polar vortex supercrystal in a heterostructure that hosts a fine balance between built-in electrostatic and elastic frustrations by design. By perturbing this balance with photoinduced charges, an initially heterogeneous mixture of polar phase disorders within a few picoseconds, leading to a state composed of disordered ferroelectric and suppressed vortex orders. On the picosecond�nanosecond timescales, transient labyrinthine fluctuations develop, accompanied by the recovery of the vortex order. On longer timescales, these fluctuations are progressively quenched by dynamical strain modulations, which drive the collective emergence of a single vortex supercrystal phase. Our results, corroborated by dynamical phase-field modelling, reveal non-equilibrium pathways following the ultrafast excitation of designer systems to persistent metastability. © UChicago Argonne, LLC, Operator of Argonne National Laboratory, and the Authors, under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Limited 2024.

Item Type:	Journal Article
Publication:	Nature Materials
Publisher:	Nature Research
Additional Information:	The copyright for this article belongs to Publisher.
Keywords:	Negative ions; Positive ions, Meta-stable state; Metastabilities; Non equilibrium; Optical-; Picoseconds; Single-shot; States of matter; Time-scales; Ultra-fast; Ultrafast excitation, Vortex flow
Department/Centre:	Division of Chemical Sciences > Materials Research Centre
Date Deposited:	15 Oct 2024 05:58
Last Modified:	15 Oct 2024 05:58
URI:	http://eprints.iisc.ac.in/id/eprint/86509

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