21.04.2025 New articles resolve decades long questions in vanadium dioxide

21.04.2025

We have two new papers out studying the photoinduced phase transition in VO2  in Nature Communications and NPJ Quantum Materials. How the insulator to metal phase transition in VO2 occurs is one of condensed matter physics oldest problems, and by using ultrabroadband ~1 fs pulses we were able to measure the full evolution of the electronic structure with sub-5 fs resolution. Instead of the simple fast switching behaviour seen in previous measurements, we found a huge range of phenomena not seen in previous studies, like electronic and structural decoupling, structural revivals, extreme breaking of the Mott-Ioffe-Regel limit and even semi-metallicity at short timescales. To help understand these effects we developed cutting edge tensor-network calculations to help understand how such extreme phononic effects can occur.

Read the papers here:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-58895-z
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41535-025-00751-w