Document Type

Article

Publication Date

11-30-2021

Publication Title

Physical Review Letters

Publisher

American Physical Society

Publisher Location

Maryland, United States

Volume

127

Issue

23

First page number:

1

Last page number:

8

Abstract

Second harmonic generation (SHG) spectroscopy ubiquitously enables the investigation of surface chemistry, interfacial chemistry, as well as symmetry properties in solids. Polarization-resolved SHG spectroscopy in the visible to infrared regime is regularly used to investigate electronic and magnetic order through their angular anisotropies within the crystal structure. However, the increasing complexity of novel materials and emerging phenomena hampers the interpretation of experiments solely based on the investigation of hybridized valence states. Here, polarization-resolved SHG in the extreme ultraviolet (XUV-SHG) is demonstrated for the first time, enabling element-resolved angular anisotropy investigations. In noncentrosymmetric LiNbO3, elemental contributions by lithium and niobium are clearly distinguished by energy dependent XUV-SHG measurements. This element-resolved and symmetry-sensitive experiment suggests that the displacement of Li ions in LiNbO3, which is known to lead to ferroelectricity, is accompanied by distortions to the Nb ion environment that breaks the inversion symmetry of the NbO6 octahedron as well. Our simulations show that the measured second harmonic spectrum is consistent with Li ion displacements from the centrosymmetric position while the Nb─O bonds are elongated and contracted by displacements of the O atoms. In addition, the polarization-resolved measurement of XUV-SHG shows excellent agreement with numerical predictions based on dipole-induced SHG commonly used in the optical wavelengths. Our result constitutes the first verification of the dipole-based SHG model in the XUV regime. The findings of this work pave the way for future angle and time-resolved XUV-SHG studies with elemental specificity in condensed matter systems.

Controlled Subject

Polarization (Nuclear physics)

Disciplines

Electromagnetics and Photonics

File Format

pdf

File Size

775 KB

Rights

IN COPYRIGHT. For more information about this rights statement, please visit http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

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