Tracing the dynamics of superconducting order via transient terahertz third-harmonic generation

Research output: Contribution to journalResearch articleContributedpeer-review

Contributors

  • Min Jae Kim - , Chair of Ultrafast Solid State Physics and Photonics, Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research, University of Stuttgart (Author)
  • Sergey Kovalev - , Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (Author)
  • Mattia Udina - , University of Rome La Sapienza (Author)
  • Rafael Haenel - , Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research, University of British Columbia (Author)
  • Gideok Kim - , Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research (Author)
  • Matteo Puviani - , Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research (Author)
  • Georg Cristiani - , Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research (Author)
  • Igor Ilyakov - , Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (Author)
  • Thales V.A.G. de Oliveira - , Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (Author)
  • Alexey Ponomaryov - , Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (Author)
  • Jan Christoph Deinert - , Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (Author)
  • Gennady Logvenov - , Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research (Author)
  • Bernhard Keimer - , Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research (Author)
  • Dirk Manske - , Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research (Author)
  • Lara Benfatto - , University of Rome La Sapienza (Author)
  • Stefan Kaiser - , Chair of Ultrafast Solid State Physics and Photonics, Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research, University of Stuttgart (Author)

Abstract

Ultrafast optical control of quantum systems is an emerging field of physics. In particular, the possibility of light-driven superconductivity has attracted much of attention. To identify nonequilibrium superconductivity, it is necessary to measure fingerprints of superconductivity on ultrafast timescales. Recently, nonlinear THz third-harmonic generation (THG) was shown to directly probe the collective degrees of freedoms of the superconducting condensate, including the Higgs mode. Here, we extend this idea to light-driven nonequilibrium states in superconducting La2-xSrxCuO4, establishing an optical pump–THz–THG drive protocol to access the transient superconducting order-parameter quench and recovering on few-picosecond timescales. We show in particular the ability of two-dimensional TH spectroscopy to disentangle the effects of optically excited quasiparticles from the pure order-parameter dynamics, which are unavoidably mixed in the pump-driven linear THz response. Benchmarking the gap dynamics to existing experiments shows the ability of driven THG spectroscopy to overcome these limitations in ordinary pump-probe protocols.

Details

Original languageEnglish
Article numbereadi7598
JournalScience advances
Volume10
Issue number11
Publication statusPublished - 15 Mar 2024
Peer-reviewedYes

External IDs

PubMed 38489363
ORCID /0000-0001-9862-2788/work/157319409

Keywords

ASJC Scopus subject areas