Photoinduced melting dynamics and collective mode in a correlated charge-ordered system

Abstract

We theoretically investigate the transient spectral function during the photoinduced melting of charge order in a correlated electron system, to unravel the dynamical processes triggered by different initial excitations. We employ a one-dimensional interacting spinless fermion model introducing a pulsed laser light, and perform a comparative study by the Hartree-Fock approximation and by the exact diagonalization method to numerically solve the time-dependent Schr\"odinger equation. We find characteristic behavior in the transient spectral function, whose features strongly depend on the pump light frequency $\omega_p$. When $\omega_p$ is resonant with the collective phase mode of frequency $\Omega_c\simeq \Delta_{\rm CO}/2$, where $\Delta_{\rm CO}$ is the charge gap, the transient spectral function exhibits a photoinduced in-gap weight which triggers large responses. With increasing the laser intensity, the development of in-gap weight directly turns into the collapse of the gap. This charge-order destabilization process is in sharp contrast to the case of $\omega_p>\Delta_{\rm CO}$, where the photoirradiation induces interband electron-hole excitations giving rise to a shrinkage of the gap. The impact of quantum fluctuations and spatial inhomogeneity on the photoinduced dynamics is also discussed.