This is a very brief discussion of some experimental and theoretical studies of materials responding to fast intense laser pulses, with emphasis on those cases where the electronic response and structural response are both potentially important (and ordinarily coupled). Examples are nonthermal insulator-to-metal transitions and light-induced superconductivity in cuprates, fullerenes, and an organic Mott insulator.
We report simulations of the response of InSb, GaAs, and Si to 70-femtosecond laser pulses of various intensities. In agreement with the experiments of Mazur and coworkers, and other groups, there is a nonthermal phase transition for each of these semiconductors above a threshold intensity. Our simulations employ tight-binding electron-ion dynamics (TED), a technique which is briefly described in the text. In the experimental pump-probe observations, the dielectric function (epsilon) ((omega) ) and the second-order susceptibility (chi) (2) can be measured. These same quantities can be calculated during a TED simulation, and there is good agreement in the behavior with respect to both time and frequency. The simulations provide much additional microscopic information which is experimentally inaccessible: for example, the time-dependence of the atomic pair-correlation function, electronic energy bands, occupancies of excited states, kinetic energy of the atoms, and excursions of atoms from their initial positions.
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