Disentangling heterogeneity and disorder during ultrafast surface melting of orbital order

• DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2407.03013
• Publication Date: 2024-07-03
• Authors: Maurizio Monti; Khalid M. Siddiqui; Daniel Perez-Salinas; Naman Agarwal; Martin Bremholm; Xiang Li; D. Prabhakaran; Xin Liu; Danylо Babich; M. Sander; Yunpei Deng; H. Lemke; Roman Mankowsky; Xuerong Liu; Simon Wall
• Keywords: Condensed Matter - Strongly Correlated Electrons; Condensed Matter - Materials Science; Strongly Correlated Electrons (cond-mat.str-el); Materials Science (cond-mat.mtrl-sci); FOS: Physical sciences

Understanding how light modifies long-range order is key to improve our ability control material functionality on an ultrafast timescale. Transient spatial heterogeneity has been proposed in many materials, but isolating the dynamics of different regions experimentally challenging. Here we address this issue and measure orbital melting layered manganite, La0.5Sr1.5MnO4, isolate surface from bulk for first time. Bulk measurements show rapidly suppressed, correlation length surprisingly increases. However, dynamics, a stronger suppression significant decrease length. By changes, find that preferentially melts less ordered loss likely driven by formation local disordered polarons. Melting effectively increases average probed volume, resolving contradictory response. These results scattering methods are necessary understand both heterogeneous materials.