Science Daily February 12, 2021
An international team of researchers (the Netherlands, Ukraine, Russia, Belgium, UK) shows that light-driven phonons can be utilized to coherently manipulate macroscopic magnetic states. Intense mid-infrared electric field pulses tuned to resonance with a phonon mode of the archetypical antiferromagnet DyFeO3 induce ultrafast and long-living changes of the fundamental exchange interaction between rare-earth orbitals and transition metal spins. Non-thermal lattice control of the magnetic exchange, which defines the stability of the macroscopic magnetic state, allows picosecond coherent switching between competing antiferromagnetic and weakly ferromagnetic spin orders. The discovery emphasizes the potential of resonant phonon excitation for the manipulation of ferroic order on ultrafast timescales…read more. TECHNICAL ARTICLE
Phonon-driven reconfiguration of the magnetic potential in DyFeO3. Credit: Nature Materials (2021)