Single laser pulse driven thermal limit of the quasi-two dimensional magnetic ordering in Sr2IrO4
Abstract
Upon femtosecond-laser stimulation, generally materials are expected to recover back to their thermal-equilibrium conditions, with only a few exceptions reported. Here we demonstrate that deviation from the thermal-equilibrium pathway can be induced in canonical 3D antiferromagnetically (AFM) ordered Sr2IrO4 by a single 100-fs-laser pulse, appearing as losing long-range magnetic correlation along one direction into a glassy condition. We further discover a `critical-threshold ordering' behavior for fluence above approximately 12 mJ/cm2 which we show corresponds to the smallest thermodynamically stable c-axis correlation length needed to maintain long-range quasi-two-dimensional AFM order. We suggest that this behavior arises from the crystalline anisotropy of the magnetic-exchange parameters in Sr2IrO4, whose strengths are associated with distinctly different timescales. As a result, they play out very differently in the ultrafast recovery processes, compared with the thermal equilibrium evolution. Thus, our observations are expected to be relevant to a wide range of problems in the nonequilibrium behavior of low-dimensional magnets and other related ordering phenomena.
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