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International Union of CrystallographyEuropean Crystallographic AssociationEuropean Office of Aerospace Research and DevelopmentMinistry of Science and Information Society Technologies  Warsaw University of TechnologyUniversity of Bialystok



 
  Theory of photoinduced phase transitions: from semiclassical to quantum aspects

Tetsuo Ogawa
Osaka University, Japan

Topics

I review recent progress of theoretical studies for the photoinduced phase transitions (PIPTs) to clarify what the PIPTs are. The PIPTs are classified into two types: (a) global phase change via optically excited states and (b) new phase creation in optically excited states.
  • First, concerning with (a), photoinduced structural phase transitions via excited electronic states are discussed theoretically using a one-dimensional model composed of localized electrons and lattices under the adiabatic or diabatic approximation. I show that the global structural change by photoexcitation only at a site is possible, and I clarify conditions for the occurrence of such phenomena. Spatiotemporal dynamics of nonequilibrium first-order phase transitions is also investigated in detail in terms of photoinduced nucleations and domino processes of the domain boundaries (domain walls), which are in striking contrast to the mean-field dynamics.

    In the adiabatic regime, after the spontaneous emission of a photon, an initial local structural change (i) remains locally, (ii) induces cooperatively a global structural change, or (iii) disappears and returns to the initial phase. Dynamical features of the case (ii) are characterized by the deterministic domino process; domain walls between the two phases move deterministically at a constant velocity (with changing speed) without further spontaneous emissions in the case of strong (weak) dissipation. In the diabatic regime, similar three types of structural change exist. The domain-wall dynamics is described as the stochastic domino process, which is accompanied by the successive radiative transitions.
  • Second, concerning with (b), I discuss quantum states of electron-hole systems, which are optically excited states consisting of many electrons and holes in two bands. In particular, the exciton Mott transition, the "from-insulator-to-metal transition" of the electron-hole systems as the particle density increases is introduced in detail. In the one-dimensional case, bozonization technique and the renormalization group method are employed. The one-dimensional systems are found to be insulating even at the high density limit and that the exciton Mott transition never occurs at absolute zero temperature. The insulating ground state exhibits a strong instability towards the crystallization of biexcitons. In the case of higher dimensions, we analyze a two-band Hubbard model with interactions of electron-electron (hole-hole) repulsion U and electron-hole attraction -U'. With the use of the dynamical mean-field theory, the phase diagram in the U-U' plane is obtained (which is exact in infinite dimensions) assuming that electron-hole pairs do not condense. When both electron and hole bands are half-filled, two types of insulating states appear: the Mott-Hubbard insulator for U>U' and the biexciton-like insulator for U