Structural dynamics of LaVO3 on the nanosecond time scale

Due to the strong dependence of electronic properties on the local bonding environment, a full characterization of the structural dynamics in ultrafast experiments is critical. Here, we report the dynamics and structural refinement at nanosecond time scales of a perovskite thin film by combining opt...

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Veröffentlicht in:Structural dynamics (Melville, N.Y.) N.Y.), 2019-01, Vol.6 (1), p.014502-014502
Hauptverfasser: Brahlek, Matthew, Stoica, Vladimir A., Lapano, Jason, Zhang, Lei, Akamatsu, Hirofumi, Tung, I-Cheng, Gopalan, Venkatraman, Walko, Donald A., Wen, Haidan, Freeland, John W., Engel-Herbert, Roman
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Sprache:eng
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Zusammenfassung:Due to the strong dependence of electronic properties on the local bonding environment, a full characterization of the structural dynamics in ultrafast experiments is critical. Here, we report the dynamics and structural refinement at nanosecond time scales of a perovskite thin film by combining optical excitation with time-resolved X-ray diffraction. This is achieved by monitoring the temporal response of both integer and half-integer diffraction peaks of LaVO3 in response to an above-band-gap 800 nm pump pulse. We find that the lattice expands by 0.1% out of plane, and the relaxation is characterized by a biexponential decay with 2 and 12 ns time scales. We analyze the relative intensity change in half-integer peaks and show that the distortions to the substructure are small: the oxygen octahedral rotation angles decrease by ∼0.3° and La displacements decrease by ∼0.2 pm, which directly corresponds to an ∼0.8° increase in the V-O-V bond-angles, an in-plane V-O bond length reduction of ∼0.3 pm, and an unchanged out-of-plane bond length. This demonstration of tracking the atomic positions in a pump-probe experiment provides experimentally accessible values for structural and electronic tunability in this class of materials and will stimulate future experiments.
ISSN:2329-7778
2329-7778
DOI:10.1063/1.5045704