Femtosecond laser pulse-induced breakdown of the insulating phase in bulk V2O3: a TDDFT+DMFT study

We use the time-dependent density-functional theory + dynamical mean-field theory (TDDFT+DMFT) approach to analyze the details of the insulator-to-metal transition and ultrafast charge dynamics in bulk V2O3 excited by various femtosecond laser pulses. In this approach, to properly include the effects of strong electron-electron correlations into TDDFT calculations one uses an exchange-correlation potential obtained by solving the DMFT problem. We analyze the time-dependence of the excited charge density and of the resulting time-dependent charge conductivity of the system and demonstrate that both quantities have a power-like time-dependence. We pay a special attention to the orbital-resolved tempo-spatial charge dynamics during the metallization in V2O3 and argue that this process is strongly spatially–nonhomogeneous. We establish the time-dependence of the size of metallic domains at different values of the pulse parameters and draw consequences of the results in term of potentially-measurable experimental quantities, like femtosecond conductivity and emission.