Journal article

Femtosecond dynamics of the collinear-to-spiral antiferromagnetic phase transition in CuO.

  • 2012-03-10
Published in:
  • Physical review letters. - 2012
English We report on the ultrafast dynamics of magnetic order in a single crystal of CuO at a temperature of 207 K in response to strong optical excitation using femtosecond resonant x-ray diffraction. In the experiment, a femtosecond laser pulse induces a sudden, nonequilibrium increase in magnetic disorder. After a short delay ranging from 400 fs to 2 ps, we observe changes in the relative intensity of the magnetic ordering diffraction peaks that indicate a shift from a collinear commensurate phase to a spiral incommensurate phase. These results indicate that the ultimate speed for this antiferromagnetic reorientation transition in CuO is limited by the long-wavelength magnetic excitation connecting the two phases.
Language
  • English
Open access status
hybrid
Identifiers
Persistent URL
https://sonar.ch/global/documents/159225
Statistics

Document views: 15 File downloads:
  • fulltext.pdf: 0