Attosecond science meets two-dimensional materials

by Dr Antonio Picón (Departamento de Química and Condensed Matter Physics Center (IFIMAC), Universidad Autónoma de Madrid)

Monday 16 Sept 2024, 11:00 → 12:00 Europe/Zurich

PSI Auditorium (WHGA/001)

The use of light is nowadays the fastest way to observe and control electronic motion. Novel laser HHG-based sources enable us to produce pulses in the attosecond scale (10^-18 s), even in the X-ray regime. Also, nowadays XFEL facilities have the capability to produce attosecond X-ray pulses. In this talk, we will review our main advances in this field applied to material science. Current ultrafast experiments already demonstrated the potential to follow the electron motion in few-layers materials [1] by using the characteristic site-specificity of X-ray interactions. One of the cornerstones of attosecond science is the possibility to induce charge and energy transfer in unprecedented time scales by exploiting coherence, the so-called attosecond charge migration. Those processes have been vastly studied in molecular systems, but not extended to materials. We will show how a similar migration can be implemented in two-dimensional materials by exploiting excitons [2]. To model a future attosecond X-ray spectroscopy experiment for exciton migration it is essential to be able to describe both the light-induced dynamics and the observable to be measured within a real-time approach [3]. Perspectives of the possibility to obtain information of the topological phase from the absorption of circularly polarized attosecond pulses [4,5] will be further discussed.

 

References

[1] B. Buades, A. Picon, et al., Applied Physics Reviews 8, 011408 (2021)

[2] M. Malakhov, G. Cistaro, F. Martín, and A. Picón, Communications Physics 7, 196 (2024)

[3] G. Cistaro, M. Malakhov, et al., J. Chem. Theory Comput. 19, 333 (2023)

[4] G. Cistaro, L. Plaja, F. Martín, and A. Picón, Phys. Rev. Research 3, 013144 (2021)

[5] J. F. P. Mosquera, G. Cistaro, et al., arXiv 2407.03737