Nanowerk January 28, 2022
The non-equilibrium driving of dressed quasiparticles offers a promising platform for realizing unconventional many-body phenomena and phases beyond thermodynamic equilibrium. An international team of researchers (USA – MIT, South Korea) achieved this in the van der Waals correlated insulator NiPS3 by photoexciting its newly discovered spin–orbit-entangled excitons that arise from Zhang-Rice states. By monitoring the time evolution of the terahertz conductivity, they observed the coexistence of itinerant carriers produced by exciton dissociation and a long-wavelength antiferromagnetic magnon that coherently processes in time. These results demonstrate the emergence of a transient metallic state that preserves long-range antiferromagnetism, a phase that cannot be reached by simply tuning the temperature. According to the researchers their findings open an avenue toward the exciton-mediated optical manipulation of magnetism…read more. Open Access TECHNICAL ARTICLEÂ
Crystal structure and optical properties of NiPS3. Credit: Nature Communications volume 12, Article number: 4837 (2021)Â