Light-wave coherent control of the insulator-to-metal transition in a strongly correlated material

The use of intense tailored light fields is the perfect tool to achieve ultrafast control of electronic properties in quantum materials. Among them, Mott insulators are materials in which strong electron-electron interactions drive the material into an insulating phase. When shinning a Mott insulator with a strong laser pulse, the electric field may induce the creation of doublon-hole pairs, triggering an insulator-to-metal phase transition. In this work, we take advantage of the threshold character of this insulator-to-metal transition and we propose a pump-probe scheme that consists of a mid-infrared laser pulse and a train of short pulses separated by half-period of the mid-infrared with alternating phases. By varying the time-delay between the two pulses and the internal carrier envelope phase of the short pulses, we achieve control of the phase transition, which leaves its fingerprint at its high harmonic spectrum.