Dynamical many-body control of high harmonic generation in a Mott insulator
Abstract
High harmonic generation (HHG) has emerged as a powerful probe of ultrafast electron dynamics in solids. However, in strongly correlated materials, where electronic excitations arise from many-body interactions rather than single-particle band dispersion, the field remains in its infancy. Here, we report HHG up to the 23rd order in the prototypical Mott insulator La2CuO4. We observe a robust 4 eV cutoff that is independent of driving field strength, revealing an intrinsic energy scale defined by the Hubbard bands. Using time-resolved high harmonic spectroscopy, we disentangle the distinct contributions of carrier creation, intraband acceleration, and interband recombination to the nonequilibrium radiation spectrum. We demonstrate that photo-doping triggers a fundamental reorganization of the many-body manifolds above a critical excitation density, a process that renormalizes the band curvature and suppresses nonlinear intraband currents, thereby directly imprinting the signature of many-body band reconstruction onto the harmonic emission. These results establish HHG as a sensitive probe of subtle correlation-driven electronic reconstructions and highlight that many-body interactions enable extreme nonlinear optical responses that are highly tunable in nonequilibrium states.
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BibTeX
@misc{guo2026dynamical,
title = {{Dynamical many-body control of high harmonic generation in a Mott insulator}},
author = {Mingyao Guo and Ryo Noguchi and Mohammad Muntasir Hassan and Steven J. Gomez Alvarado and Reina M. Gomez and Yao-Jui Chan and Yu-Chieh Wen and Stephen D. Wilson and Yao Wang and David Hsieh},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2610.12136},
eprint = {2610.12136},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.12136},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Dynamical many-body control of high harmonic generation in a Mott insulator
AU - Mingyao Guo
AU - Ryo Noguchi
AU - Mohammad Muntasir Hassan
AU - Steven J. Gomez Alvarado
AU - Reina M. Gomez
AU - Yao-Jui Chan
AU - Yu-Chieh Wen
AU - Stephen D. Wilson
AU - Yao Wang
AU - David Hsieh
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/08
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2610.12136
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.12136
AB - High harmonic generation (HHG) has emerged as a powerful probe of ultrafast electron dynamics in solids. However, in strongly correlated materials, where electronic excitations arise from many-body interactions rather than single-particle band dispersion, the field remains in its infancy. Here, we report HHG up to the 23^rd order in the prototypical Mott insulator La_2CuO_4. We observe a robust 4 eV cutoff that is independent of driving field strength, revealing an intrinsic energy scale defined by the Hubbard bands. Using time-resolved high harmonic spectroscopy, we disentangle the distinct contributions of carrier creation, intraband acceleration, and interband recombination to the nonequilibrium radiation spectrum. We demonstrate that photo-doping triggers a fundamental reorganization of the many-body manifolds above a critical excitation density, a process that renormalizes the band curvature and suppresses nonlinear intraband currents, thereby directly imprinting the signature of many-body band reconstruction onto the harmonic emission. These results establish HHG as a sensitive probe of subtle correlation-driven electronic reconstructions and highlight that many-body interactions enable extreme nonlinear optical responses that are highly tunable in nonequilibrium states.
ER -