Seminars Archive

Correlated metastable orders created out of equilibrium by short electro-magnetic pulses

Abstract
The idea that quantum systems may be coerced by light pulses to order while they are outside of equilibrium is very appealing, and dates back many decades. However, the resulting transient states are very often hard to pin down because we lack the necessary tools to investigate them on short timescales. However, the lifetime of such electromagnetically-induced states depends on the barrier for macroscopic state reconfiguration, which may vary significantly in different systems. Two-dimensional polaronic Wigner crystals based on transition metal dichalcogenides display low-energy configurational states that have tunable lifetimes, which means that they be studied in unprecedented detail. In this presentation I will show detailed microscopic and mesoscopic metastable structures on timescales between femtoseconds to hours that appear in a prototype dichalcogenide, revealing some unexpected new quantum states with properties that cannot be understood with conventional approaches. Our experiments suggest that a very large number of diverse quantum states may be created under highly non-equilibrium conditions that can hardly be predicted from the viewpoint of equilibrium physics.