{"id":163513,"date":"2023-05-08T04:22:27","date_gmt":"2023-05-08T09:22:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2023\/05\/light-boosts-magnetism-in-a-crystal"},"modified":"2023-05-08T04:22:27","modified_gmt":"2023-05-08T09:22:27","slug":"light-boosts-magnetism-in-a-crystal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2023\/05\/light-boosts-magnetism-in-a-crystal","title":{"rendered":"Light Boosts Magnetism in a Crystal"},"content":{"rendered":"<p style=\"padding-right: 20px\"><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/light-boosts-magnetism-in-a-crystal2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>The current work springs from a 2007 study in which Cavalleri and his team reported using terahertz laser pulses to distort a lattice into favoring a particular ground state [<a href=\"https:\/\/physics.aps.org\/articles\/v16\/52#c2\" class=\"\">2<\/a>]. The pulses excited specific, quantized vibrations\u2014phonons\u2014that changed the electronic state of a crystal, yielding a transient drop in electrical resistance of 5 orders of magnitude.<\/p>\n<p>In their new experiment, the researchers selected three laser frequencies that were separately coupled to one of several possible lattice distortions in YTiO<sub>3<\/sub>. Using a magneto-optical pump-probe setup, they examined how each of the excitations affected the crystal\u2019s structure and its magnetism. Specifically, they observed whether the polarization of the light reflected by the crystal changed when viewed in opposite directions. A clockwise\u2013counterclockwise shift in the polarization of the reflected light would be a sure sign of time-reversal invariance, which happens only in the presence of magnetic order.<\/p>\n<p>They found that ultrafast laser pulses tuned to a phonon frequency of 9 THz caused the YTiO<sub>3<\/sub> crystal to fully magnetize just above zero K. They then showed that this order, instead of vanishing at 27 K, remained stable up to at least 80 K, the highest temperature that they measured. What\u2019s more, the magnetism persisted for many nanoseconds, 6 orders of magnitude longer than the femtoseconds-long laser pulses. The team attribute this long-lasting state to the stability of the structural distortions induced by energy deposited by the laser.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The current work springs from a 2007 study in which Cavalleri and his team reported using terahertz laser pulses to distort a lattice into favoring a particular ground state [2]. The pulses excited specific, quantized vibrations\u2014phonons\u2014that changed the electronic state of a crystal, yielding a transient drop in electrical resistance of 5 orders of magnitude. [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1497],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-163513","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-energy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/163513","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=163513"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/163513\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=163513"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=163513"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=163513"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}