2019/12/04 by D. Afanasiev, J. R. Hortensius, B. A. Ivanov +6 · 4 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #cond-mat.str-el #cond-mat.mtrl-sci
paper · pdf · doi:10.1038/s41563-021-00922-7
published as Nature Materials 20, 607-611 (2021) · 36 pages 25 figures
arxiv created 2019/12/04 · arxiv updated 2021/05/13
Exciting atomic oscillations with light is a powerful technique to control the electronic properties of materials, leading to remarkable phenomena such as light-induced superconductivity and ultrafast insulator to metal transitions. Here we show that light-driven lattice vibrations can be utilised to encode efficiently spin information in a magnetic medium. Intense mid-infrared electric field pulses, tuned to resonance with a vibrational normal mode of antiferromagnetic DyFeO3, drive the emergence of long-living weak ferromagnetic order. Light-driven phonon displacements promptly lower the energy barrier separating competing magnetic states, allowing the alignment of spins to occur within a few picoseconds, via non-equilibrium dynamics of the magnetic energy landscape.