Li, Jiajun Strand, Hugo U. R. Werner, Philipp Eckstein, Martin 2018-11-02 Photo-induced hidden phases are often observed in materials with intertwined orders. Understanding the formation of these non-thermal phases is challenging and requires a resolution of the cooperative interplay between different orders on the ultra-short timescale. In this work, we demonstrate that non-equilibrium photo-excitations can induce a state with spin-orbital orders entirely different from the equilibrium state in the three-quarter-filled two-band Hubbard model. We identify a general mechanism governing the transition to the hidden state, which relies on a non-thermal partial melting of the intertwined orders mediated by photoinduced charge excitations in the presence of strong spin-orbital exchange interactions. Our study theoretically confirms the crucial role played by orbital degrees of freedom in the light-induced dynamics of strongly correlated materials and it shows that the switching to hidden states can be controlled already on the fs timescale of the electron dynamics. application/pdf https://folia.unifr.ch/global/documents/307515 https://folia.unifr.ch/documents/307515/files/wer_tpu.pdf eng info:eu-repo/semantics/altIdentifier/doi/10.1038/s41467-018-07051-x info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess License undefined Nature Communications. - 2018, vol. 9, no. 1, p. 4581 info:eu-repo/classification/udc/53 Theory of photoinduced ultrafast switching to a spin-orbital ordered hidden phase http://purl.org/coar/resource_type/c_6501