Recent developments in the generation of highly intense few-cycle coherent pulses of THz-frequency electromagnetic pulses have suggested the possibility to use such pulses to drive structural changes in multiferroic and ferroelectric materials. According to some theoretical models, such pulses could be used to rapidly reorient domains on time scales of only a few picoseconds [1,2]. Here I discuss some recent experiments that use time-resovled x-ray diffraction to quantitatively track the motions of both spins in mutliferoic TbMnO3 [3] and atoms in the ferroelectric Sn2P2S6 [4] as they are driven coherently by a THz pulse with a significant spectral overlap to excitations that are thought to mediate such domain reorientations. The experiments observe large-scale motions that make it possible to estimate the conditions that would be needed to realize switching of ferroic orientaitons in these mateirals on a time scale of less than 10 ps.
References
[1] M. Mochizuki and N. Nagaosa, Phys. Rev. Lett. 105, 147202 (2010).
[2] T. Qi et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 102, 247603 (2009).
[3] T. Kubacka et al., Science 343, 1333 (2014).
[4] S. Grübel et al. arXiv:1602.05435.