Single-shot spectroscopy techniques provide scientists with a new understanding of a mysterious light-driven process.
Harold “Doc” Edgerton, the late MIT professor, developed high-speed strobe-flash photography in the 1960s that allowed us to visualize events too fast for the eye — a droplet hitting a pool of milk or a bullet piercing an apple.
Now, scientists at MIT and the University of Texas at Austin have for the first time captured snapshots of a light-induced metastable phase hidden from the equilibrium universe by using a suite of advanced…
Mysterious Hidden Quantum Phase in a 2D Crystal Captured by Scientists for the First Time
Hidden Quantum Phase in 2D Crystal
This illustration represents the light-induced collapse of the nanoscale charge order in a 2D crystal of tantalum disulfide (star-shapes) and the generation of a hidden metastable metallic state (spheres). Credit: Frank Yi Gao
Single-shot spectroscopy techniques provide scientists with a new understanding of a mysterious light-driven process.
Harold “Doc” Edgerton, the late MIT professor, developed high-speed strobe-flash photography in the 1960s that allowed us to visualize events too fast for the eye — a droplet hitting a pool of milk or a bullet piercing an apple.
Now, scientists at MIT and the University of Texas at Austin have for the first time captured snapshots of a light-induced metastable phase hidden from the equilibrium universe by using a suite of advanced spectroscopic tools. They were able to view this transition in real-time by using single-shot spectroscopy techniques on a 2D crystal with nanoscale modulations of electron density.
“With this work, we are showing the birth and evolution of a hidden quantum phase induced by an ultrashort laser pulse in an electronically modulated crystal,” says Frank Gao PhD ’22, co-lead author on a paper about the work who is currently a postdoc at UT Austin.
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