2019/10/31 by Álvaro Jiménez-Galán, Á. Jiménez-Galán, Rui E. F. Silva +5 · 2 citations
Engineering · Physics and Astronomy · #Advanced Fiber Laser Technologies #Electric field #Electrical engineering #Electronics #Engineering #Femto- #Femtosecond #Floquet theory #Laser #Laser-Matter Interactions and Applications #Nonlinear system #Optics #Optoelectronics #Phaser #Physics #Terahertz technology and applications #Ultrashort pulse #cond-mat.mes-hall #physics.optics
paper · pdf · doi:10.1038/s41566-020-00717-3
arxiv created 2020/02/03 · openalex created_date 2020/02/07 · openalex publication_date 2020/11/16 · arxiv updated 2020/11/25 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
Modern light generation technology offers extraordinary capabilities for sculpting light pulses, with full control over individual electric field oscillations within each laser cycle. These capabilities are at the core of lightwave electronics - the dream of ultrafast lightwave control over electron dynamics in solids, on a few-cycle to sub-cycle timescale, aiming at information processing at tera-Hertz to peta-Hertz rates. Here we show a robust and general approach to valley-selective electron excitations in two-dimensional solids, by controlling the sub-cycle structure of non-resonant driving fields at a few-femtosecond timescale. Bringing the frequency-domain concept of topological Floquet systems to the few-fsec time domain, we develop a transparent control mechanism in real space and an all-optical, non-element-specific method to coherently write, manipulate and read selective valley excitations using fields carried in a wide range of frequencies, on timescales that can be much shorter than the valley lifetime, crucial for implementation of valleytronic devices.