Transition metals, with their densely confined and strongly coupled valence electrons, are key constituents of many materials with unconventional properties1, such as high-temperature superconductors, Mott insulators and transition metal dichalcogenides2. Strong interaction offers a fast and efficient lever to manipulate electron properties with light, creating promising potential for next-generation electronics3,4,5,6. However, the underlying dynamics is a hard-to-understand, fast and intricate interplay of polarization and screening effects, which are hidden below the femtosecond timescale of electronic thermalization that follows photoexcitation7. Here, we investigate the many-body electron dynamics in transition metals before thermalization sets in. We combine the sensitivity of intra-shell transitions to screening effects8 with attosecond time resolution to uncover the interplay of photo-absorption and screening. First-principles time-dependent calculations allow us to assign our experimental observations to ultrafast electronic localization on d orbitals. The latter modifies the electronic structure as well as the collective dynamic response of the system on a timescale much faster than the light-field cycle. Our results demonstrate a possibility for steering the electronic properties of solids before electron thermalization. We anticipate that our study may facilitate further investigations of electronic phase transitions, laser–metal interactions and photo-absorption in correlated-electron systems on their natural timescales.
We perform a detailed study of the phase transitions and mechanisms of electron localization in the extended Hubbard model using the dynamical cluster approximation on a $2\ifmmode\times\else\texttimes\fi{}2$ cluster. We explore the interplay of charge order and Mott physics. We find that a nearest-neighbor Coulomb interaction
V causes ``screening'' effects close to the Mott phase transition, pushing the phase boundary to larger values of
U. We also demonstrate the different effects of
V on correlations in metallic and insulating regimes, and document the different correlation aspects of charge order and Mott states.
A material's phase diagram typically indicates the types of realized long-range orders, corresponding to instabilities in static response functions. In correlated systems, however, key phenomena crucially depend on dynamical processes, too: In a Mott insulator, the electrons' spin moment fluctuates in time, while it is dynamically screened in Kondo systems. Here, we introduce a timescale
tm characteristic for the screening of the local spin moment and demonstrate that it fully characterizes the dynamical mean-field phase diagram of the Hubbard model: The retarded magnetic response delineates the Mott transition and provides a new perspective on its signatures in the supercritical region above. We show that
tm has knowledge of the Widom line and that it can be used to demarcate the Fermi liquid from the bad metal regime. Additionally, it reveals new structures inside the Fermi liquid phase: First, we identify a region with preformed local moments that we suggest to have a thermodynamic signature. Second, approaching the Mott transition from weak coupling, we discover a regime in which the spin dynamics becomes adiabatic, in the sense that it is much slower than valence fluctuations. Our findings provide resolution limits for magnetic measurements and may build a bridge to the relaxation dynamics of non-equilibrium states.