Prof. Freericks publishes research on ultrafast pump/probe spectroscopy in Nature Communications

Professor Freericks is part of an international team of researchers that discovered how a high temperature superconductor relaxes after being driven by intense laser light. This work was published in the prestigious journal Nature Communications. The interesting new discovery is that the electrons in the superconductor lose their energy in a rapid coherent fashion by coupling to a phonon which also appears to be responsible for creating the so-called kink feature in angle resolved photomission spectroscopy. Interestingly, the electrons appear to all couple strongly to this one lattice vibration and when their excited energy falls below the phonon energy, they relax in a more random fashion over a longer time scale. This work has also been summarized by Georgetown College.