IMX Seminar Series - Atom-scale quantum choreography to the beat of light

Understanding the function of novel quantum materials calls for means to directly watch their elementary building blocks in motion, on their intrinsic length and time scales. Recently, lightwave electronics has made this long-standing dream come true. The idea is to exploit the carrier wave of light as an ultrafast bias to interrogate and control the nanocosm. I will first review how lightwaves can drive electrons in solids, such as 2D materials and topological insulators, into surprising sub-cycle quantum motion. By combining this idea with the spatial resolution of scanning tunneling microscopy we record the first atom-scale slow-motion movies of individual vibrating molecules. Lightwaves inside the tunnelling junction can even serve as femtosecond atomic forces to choreo­graph a coherent structural motion of a single-molecule switch. This concept offers a radically new way of directly watching and controlling key elementary dynamics in nature and steer (bio)chemical reactions or ultrafast phase transitions, on their intrinsic spatio-temporal scales.