Dynamical many-body control of high harmonic generation in a Mott insulator

Mingyao Guo; Ryo Noguchi; Mohammad Muntasir Hassan; Steven J. Gomez Alvarado; Reina M. Gomez; Yao-Jui Chan; Yu-Chieh Wen; Stephen D. Wilson; Yao Wang; David Hsieh

arXiv · 2610.12136

Dynamical many-body control of high harmonic generation in a Mott insulator

Mingyao Guo·Ryo Noguchi·Mohammad Muntasir Hassan·Steven J. Gomez Alvarado·Reina M. Gomez·Yao-Jui Chan·Yu-Chieh Wen·Stephen D. Wilson·Yao Wang·David Hsieh

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Abstract

High harmonic generation (HHG) has emerged as a powerful probe of ultrafast electron dynamics in solids. However, in strongly correlated materials, where electronic excitations arise from many-body interactions rather than single-particle band dispersion, the field remains in its infancy. Here, we report HHG up to the 23$^{rd}$ order in the prototypical Mott insulator La$_2$CuO$_4$. We observe a robust 4 eV cutoff that is independent of driving field strength, revealing an intrinsic energy scale defined by the Hubbard bands. Using time-resolved high harmonic spectroscopy, we disentangle the distinct contributions of carrier creation, intraband acceleration, and interband recombination to the nonequilibrium radiation spectrum. We demonstrate that photo-doping triggers a fundamental reorganization of the many-body manifolds above a critical excitation density, a process that renormalizes the band curvature and suppresses nonlinear intraband currents, thereby directly imprinting the signature of many-body band reconstruction onto the harmonic emission. These results establish HHG as a sensitive probe of subtle correlation-driven electronic reconstructions and highlight that many-body interactions enable extreme nonlinear optical responses that are highly tunable in nonequilibrium states.

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Mingyao Guo, Ryo Noguchi, Mohammad Muntasir Hassan, Steven J. Gomez Alvarado, Reina M. Gomez, Yao-Jui Chan, Yu-Chieh Wen, Stephen D. Wilson, Yao Wang, David Hsieh. 2026-10-08. Dynamical many-body control of high harmonic generation in a Mott insulator. https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.12136

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