作者
Vladimir A. Stoica,Tiannan Yang,Sujit Das,Yue Cao,Huai‐Yu Wang,Yuya Kubota,Cheng Dai,Haricharan Padmanabhan,Yusuke Sato,Anudeep Mangu,Quynh L. Nguyen,Zhan Zhang,Disha Talreja,Marc Zajac,Donald A. Walko,Anthony D. DiChiara,Shigeki Owada,Kohei Miyanishi,Kenji Tamasaku,Takahiro Sato,James M. Glownia,Vincent Esposito,S. Nelson,Matthias C. Hoffmann,Richard D. Schaller,Aaron M. Lindenberg,Lane W. Martin,R. Ramesh,Iwao Matsuda,Diling Zhu,Long-Q. Chen,Haidan Wen,Venkatraman Gopalan,J. W. Freeland
摘要
Ultrafast stimuli can stabilize metastable states of matter inaccessible by equilibrium means. Establishing the spatiotemporal link between ultrafast excitation and metastability is crucial to understanding these phenomena. Here, we use single-shot optical-pump, X-ray-probe measurements to provide 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, a starting heterogenous mixture of polar phases disorders within a few picoseconds, resulting in a soup state composed of disordered ferroelectric and suppressed vortex orders. On the pico-to-nanosecond timescales, transient labyrinthine fluctuations form in this soup along with a recovering vortex order. On longer timescales, these fluctuations are progressively quenched by dynamical strain modulations, which drive the collective emergence of a single supercrystal phase. Our results, corroborated by dynamical phase-field modeling, reveal how ultrafast excitation of designer systems generates pathways for persistent metastability.