Reply to: Ultrafast evolution and transient phases of a prototype out-of-equilibrium Mott-Hubbard material

Nanoscale self-organisation and metastable non-thermal metallicity in Mott insulators

“…We note that the above theoretical modelling may also account for the experimental evidences [10,20,21,36] of a photo-induced metal phase in V 2 O 3 . As discussed in Refs.…”

“…This slow dynamics constitutes the bottleneck for the realization of electronic volatile switches operating at frequencies as high as several THz [6], which often discouraged potential applications of insulator-to-metal transitions (IMT) in real materials either driven by temperature changes or by non-equilibrium protocols such as light excitation. In this framework, specific efforts have been recently devoted to investigate possible transient non-thermal states in vanadium oxides, which undergo temperature-driven IMT of great interest for resistive switching and neuromorphic computing applications [7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23]. Much activity has focused on developing strategies to decouple the electronic and structural changes, with the ultimate goal of achieving all-electronic switching for ultrafast Mottronics.…”

Nanoscale self-organisation in Mott insulators: a richness in disguise

“…4 Light-induced non-equilibrium transition: evidence of a transient monoclinic metal phase Space-dependent non-equilibrium model We note that the above theoretical modelling may also account for the experimental evidences 9,20,21,37 of a photo-induced metal phase in V 2 O 3 . As discussed in Refs.…”

“…As extensively discussed in the literature 20,21,27,28,37,68,69 , the electronic IMT can be also photo-induced by using ultrashort infrared pulses as the external control parameter. When the excitation is intense enough, the insulating phase collapses on a timescale of ∼30-50 ps transforming into a new phase with the same optical properties as the metallic one.…”

“…This slow dynamics constitutes the bottleneck for the realization of electronic volatile switches operating at frequencies as high as several THz 24 , which often discouraged potential applications of insulator-to-metal transitions (IMT) in real materials either driven by temperature changes or by non-equilibrium protocols such as light excitation. In this framework, specific efforts have been recently devoted to investigate possible transient non-thermal states in vanadium oxides, which undergo temperature-driven IMT of great interest for resistive switching and neuromorphic computing applications [6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23] . Much activity has focused on developing strategies to decouple the electronic and structural changes, with the ultimate goal of achieving all-electronic switching for ultrafast Mottronics.…”