Nonvolatile optical control of interlayer stacking order in 1T-TaS2

• DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2405.02831
• Publication Date: 2024-05-05
• Authors: Junde Liu; Pei Liu; Liu Yang; Sung‐Hoon Lee; Mojun Pan; Famin Chen; Jierui Huang; Bei Jiang; Mingzhe Hu; Yuchong Zhang; Zhaoyang Xie; Gang Wang; Mengxue Guan; Wei Jiang; Huaixin Yang; Jianqi Li; Chenxia Yun; Zhiwei Wang; Sheng Meng; Yugui Yao; Qian Tian; Xun Shi
• Keywords: Condensed Matter - Materials Science; Condensed Matter - Strongly Correlated Electrons; Condensed Matter - Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics; Strongly Correlated Electrons (cond-mat.str-el); Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics (cond-mat.mes-hall); Materials Science (cond-mat.mtrl-sci); FOS: Physical sciences

Nonvolatile optical manipulation of material properties on demand is a highly sought-after feature in the advancement future optoelectronic applications. While discovery such metastable transition various materials holds good promise for achieving this goal, their practical implementation still nascent stage. Here, we unravel nature ultrafast laser-induced hidden state 1T-TaS2 by systematically characterizing electronic structure evolution throughout reversible cycle. We identify it as mixed-stacking involving two similarly low-energy interlayer orders, which manifested charge density wave phase disruption. Furthermore, our comparative experiments utilizing single-pulse writing, pulse-train erasing and pulse-pair control explicitly reveal distinct mechanism bidirectional transformations -- formation initiated coherent phonon triggers competition stacking while its recovery to initial governed progressive domain coarsening. Our work highlights deterministic role competing orders nonvolatile layered 1T-TaS2, promises switching speed. More importantly, these results establish all-optical engineering low-dimensional viable strategy desirable devices.