Nonequilibrium dynamics of doped Chern ferromagnets: a case study for false vacuum decay
Even though metastable false vacuum decay is ubiquitous in physics, its underlying dynamics are still not well understood. Dissipative state preparation in moiré quantum materials provides an exceptional setting for exploring this physics since it allows the possibility of generating exotic quantum states that are not the ground state of the system Hamiltonian. Motivated by recent experiments demonstrating steady-state optical orientation of the spin-valley degree of freedom of holes, here we investigate dynamics of itinerant and Chern ferromagnets in the presence of an opposing magnetic field. Optical pumping using a circularly polarized Laguerre-Gauss beam allows us to deterministically prepare a true vacuum bubble embedded inside a metastable state. Depending on its initial size controlled by the pump power, we observe that the bubble collapses or expands due to an interplay between domain wall and bulk dynamics. For external magnetic fields comparable to the coercive field of ferromagnetism, we observe up to two-orders-of-magnitude prolongation of the spin polarization decay time at commensurate fillings corresponding to integer and fractional Chern insulator states. Our experiments reveal that the nonequilibrium dynamics of the ferromagnetic domains is substantially more sensitive to the precise filling factor around Chern insulator states than standard transport or optical measurements.